Siavahda's Blog, page 72

Must-Have Monday #72

There are SIX new SFF releases I’m excited about this week, ranging from the eventual fates of imaginary friends to hunts for ancient books of sex magic. YOU’RE WELCOME!

The Moment You Remember, You Forget (Luna Novella Book 9) by Tiffany Jimenez
Published on: 8th February 2022
Genres: Fantasy

Robert has been an imaginary twin brother to Lillian for over eighteen years.

After the sudden and deliberate death of their older sister, Robert is forced to confront the inevitability of his own death as an imagined being.

Interspersed between Robert's grappling with the logistics of what he is, are the voices of his family members: Lillian, who needed an imaginary friend late in life; Lacey and Samantha, the older twin sisters who grow apart on purpose; and Jillian, the result of a teenage pregnancy, who feels she's treated more like an imaginary being than Rob is.

The Moment You Remember, You Forget challenges the perception of what is real by exploring the boundaries of love, dependency, and grief.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-02-07T19:18:41+00:00", "description": "SIX books this week, including reluctant mating bonds and best-friends-turned-goddesses!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/must-have-monday-72\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "The Moment You Remember, You Forget (Luna Novella Book 9)", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Tiffany Jimenez", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

I love stories about imaginary friends, and this one sounds incredibly interesting! An imaginary friend who has to deal with the idea of dying??? I mean, I know it sounds kind of grim, but it’s a premise I’ve never come across before, and I really can’t wait to see what Jimenez does with it!

The Queen of the High Fields (Luna Novella Book 12) by Rhiannon Grist
Published on: 8th February 2022
Genres: Fantasy
Goodreads

Two misfits, Carys Price and Angharad 'Hazard' Evans, strike out from their disenfranchised seaside town to take ownership of the High Fields, a mythical island brimming with world-bending promise.

Objecting to the demands of modern society, they hope to find a place where they can live as they choose, but instead they find an ancient power that tears their friendship apart.

Ten years later, Carys returns to the collapsing world of the High Fields to face the terrifying power of the friend-turned-goddess she left behind.

'The Queen of the High Fields' is a Folk Horror, Dark Fantasy novella about domineering friendships, Welsh mythology and the search for lost cultural heritage.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-02-07T19:18:41+00:00", "description": "SIX books this week, including reluctant mating bonds and best-friends-turned-goddesses!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/must-have-monday-72\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "The Queen of the High Fields (Luna Novella Book 12)", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Rhiannon Grist", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

This gives me the same kind of vibes as Waking the Moon, the Elizabeth Hand cult classic, and I am HERE for that! Also, we need more stories featuring Welsh mythology; keep ’em coming!

The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gran
Published on: 8th February 2022
Genres: Fantasy
Goodreads

The highly anticipated new thriller from internationally renowned author Sara Gran, author of Come Closer and the Claire DeWitt series.

A mysterious book that promises unlimited power and unrivaled sexual pleasure. A down-on-her-luck book dealer hoping for the sale of a lifetime. And a twist so shocking, no one will come out unscathed.

After a tragedy too painful to bear, former novelist Lily Albrecht has resigned herself to a dull, sexless life as a rare book dealer. Until she gets a lead on a book that just might turn everything around. The Book of the Most Precious Substance is a 17th century manual on sex magic, rumored to be the most powerful occult book ever written—if it really exists at all. And some of the wealthiest people in the world are willing to pay Lily a fortune to find it—if she can.

Her search for the book takes her from New York to New Orleans to Munich to Paris, searching the dark corners of power where the world’s wealthiest people use black magic to fulfill their desires. Will Lily fulfill her own desires, and join them? Or will she lose it all searching for a ghost?

The Book of the Most Precious Substance is an addictive erotic thriller about the lengths we’ll go to get what we need—and what we want.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-02-07T19:18:41+00:00", "description": "SIX books this week, including reluctant mating bonds and best-friends-turned-goddesses!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/must-have-monday-72\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "The Book of the Most Precious Substance", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Sara Gran", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

It’s a running joke in my friends-group that I can’t even watch the kiss scenes in Disney movies, never mind get through a book about sex magic. But the premise of this is just so cool! So I might end up blushing so hard I pass out and don’t finish the book – but I want to try it anyway!

Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot
Representation: Lesbian MC
Published on: 8th February 2022
Genres: Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Goodreads

Lesbian gunslinger fights spies in space!

Three factions vie for control of the galaxy. Rig, a gunslinging, thieving, rebel with a cause, doesn’t give a damn about them and she hasn’t looked back since abandoning her faction three years ago.

That is, until her former faction sends her a message: return what she stole from them, or they’ll kill her twin sister.

Rig embarks on a journey across the galaxy to save her sister – but for once she’s not alone. She has help from her network of resistance contacts, her taser-wielding librarian girlfriend, and a mysterious bounty hunter.

If Rig fails and her former faction finds what she stole from them, trillions of lives will be lost--including her sister's. But if she succeeds, she might just pull the whole damn faction system down around their ears. Either way, she’s going to do it with panache and pizzazz.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-02-07T19:18:41+00:00", "description": "SIX books this week, including reluctant mating bonds and best-friends-turned-goddesses!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/must-have-monday-72\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "Bluebird", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Ciel Pierlot", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

This one didn’t quite gel with me, but I think a lot of other readers will love it, especially if you’re looking for something that moves fast and feels light, even when dealing with heavier topics.

The House of Sorrowing Stars by Beth Cartwright
Published on: 10th February 2022
Genres: Fantasy
Goodreads

A spellbinding and haunting literary fable of loss, perfect for fans of The Binding and The Night Circus.

'A transporting, delicious fairytale about loss, beauty, and love.' Kiran Millwood Hargrave

'A haunting journey of self-discovery, bursting with metaphor, and with the feel of a classic fairytale. Prepare to get lost in this spellbinding world.' Ava Reid

How do you heal a broken house?
First you unlock its secrets.

Alone on an island, surrounded by flowers that shine as dusk begins to fall, sits an old, faded house. Rooms cannot be rented here and visits are only for those haunted by the memory of loss.

When Liddy receives an invitation, she thinks there must be some mistake - she's never experienced loss. But with her curiosity stirred, and no other way to escape a life in which she feels trapped, she decides to accept.

Once there, she meets Vivienne, a beautiful, austere woman whose glare leaves Liddy unsettled; Ben, the reserved gardener; and Raphael, the enigmatic Keymaker. If Liddy is to discover her true purpose in the house, she must find the root of their sorrow - but the house won't give up its secrets so easily . . .

'Haunting, surreal, and intricate, Cartwright has deftly crafted a story about what we find when we believe we are lost.' Heather Walter, author of the Malice duology.

'Enchanting, poetic prose that enriches a beautiful fairytale world.' A. E. Warren, author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-02-07T19:18:41+00:00", "description": "SIX books this week, including reluctant mating bonds and best-friends-turned-goddesses!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/must-have-monday-72\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "The House of Sorrowing Stars", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Beth Cartwright", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

Cartwright’s prose in her previous novel was absolutely gorgeous, so even though I’m not sure I’m in the right headspace for a book about loss right now, The House of Sorrowing Stars is definitely going on my tbr! (And isn’t that just a beautiful title???)

The Alpha's Son (The Alpha's Son #1) by Penny Jessup
Representation: M/M
Published on: 12th February 2022
Genres: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Goodreads

Max Remus couldn’t care less about finding his mate—unlike the rest of his fate-obsessed pack. He totally prefers hanging with his bestie, eating his dad’s steak sandwiches, and drawing in his trusty sketchbook.

But all that is about to change at the Blue Moon Festival—a summer camp where Elite Pack wolves go to find their mates. The festival is a right of passage for every teen werewolf, and this year’s festival will be one to howl home about. The alpha’s son, Jasper Apollo, is attending for the first time.

When Max finds himself inexplicably linked with the exceptionally handsome but totally jerk-faced heir, he’s forced to grapple with the unexpected feelings clawing at his soul.
If Max rejects his destiny, will fate’s bite be worse than its bark?

Netflix's Young Royals meets Teen Wolf meets Twilight––the first instalment in a thrilling new series, The Alpha's Son is a heart-wrenching Young Adult, wolf shifter romance; full of yearning, comedy, and adventure.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-02-07T19:18:41+00:00", "description": "SIX books this week, including reluctant mating bonds and best-friends-turned-goddesses!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/must-have-monday-72\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "The Alpha's Son (The Alpha's Son #1)", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Penny Jessup", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

The description for The Alpha’s Son reads like fanfic, and that freaking DELIGHTS me! Mating-bond rom-com complete with YearningTM??? Questions of ~Fate~??? A queer werewolf who would rather be drawing in his room than doing the whole dating thing??? GIMME!

(I do have my fingers crossed that these werewolves actually turn into wolves, though. The Teen Wolf comp in the blurb has me a tiny bit concerned. No of course I’m not still holding a grudge over Jeff Davis’ wolfless werewolves, why would you ask that???)

But seriously, this sounds cute as hell with just the right combination of tropes and fun and Feels, and I’m looking forward to pouncing on it!

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

The post Must-Have Monday #72 appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

A Quiet Beginning: Age of Ash by Daniel Abraham

Age of Ash (Kithamar #1) by Daniel Abraham
Representation: Sapphic MC
Published on: 15th February 2022
Genres: Fantasy, High Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
ISBN: 0316421847
Goodreads

From New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed author Daniel Abraham, co-author of The Expanse , comes a monumental epic fantasy trilogy that unfolds within the walls of a single great city, over the course of one tumultuous year, where every story matters, and the fate of the city is woven from them all.

“An atmospheric and fascinating tapestry, woven with skill and patience.” –Joe Abercrombie, New York Times bestselling author of A Little Hatred

Kithamar is a center of trade and wealth, an ancient city with a long, bloody history where countless thousands live and their stories unfold.

This is Alys's.

When her brother is murdered, a petty thief from the slums of Longhill sets out to discover who killed him and why.  But the more she discovers about him, the more she learns about herself, and the truths she finds are more dangerous than knives. 

Swept up in an intrigue as deep as the roots of Kithamar, where the secrets of the lowest born can sometimes topple thrones, the story Alys chooses will have the power to change everything.

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.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-02-05T10:41:00+00:00", "description": "Soft and quiet as ashes.", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/a-quiet-beginning-age-of-ash-by-daniel-abraham\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "Age of Ash (Kithamar #1)", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Daniel Abraham", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "0316421847" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": 4.5, "bestRating": "5" }} Highlights

~there are a lot of gods
~a magic knife
~a magic candle
~stale bread rolls
~never trust a rich tosser

You expect someone’s come-back to a genre – as Daniel Abraham is returning to Fantasy, after years exploring a far-future galaxy with The Expanse – to be big and loud and flashy. Trumpets, announcing the return of a king. You expect a splash.

Age of Ash is not like that. It is beautifully, perfectly named, because this book is soft and quiet as ashes settling after a conflagration. If you are not careful, if you do not look closely, you might think the flames have died – you might miss the embers gleaming like jewels, like eyes, amidst the cinders. You might not realise that one wrong move – one breath, one careless breeze – could fan those sparks into an inferno that could burn a city to the ground.

This is a quiet book. An intimate book. It runs through your fingers like silk, barely whispering. You have to lean in close to make out the words.

There’s a secret in the city that almost no one knows.

No.

Stop.

Again.

There’s a secret in the city that no one knows – those who think they know it are very, very wrong.

It’s hidden well. Buried deep. There’s no hint or sign of it anywhere, and a secret that leaves no ripples keeps things simple and undramatic. Age of Ash is slow and quiet and introspective – there are no swordfights in the streets, no cinematic heroes, no good vs evil. This is not a war.

But it is about who matters?

This is such a slow-burn novel that I can just about see how some readers might not stick around for the payoff, but Abraham’s prose is just so elegant, his worldbuilding so detailed, his characters so damn human, that I couldn’t put it down. Reading Age of Ash, you feel as though you’re walking Kithamar’s streets alongside Alys and Sammish; this city breathes, and the effect is to turn it into, not so much a place you believe in, as a place you know. Abraham has a gift for that.

It was only distance that made it beautiful.

But Alys and Sammish…oh, darlings. They’re two very different young women, and one of them’s in love with the other, and the other is dragged into a downward spiral by the riptide of grief. Grief is definitely a theme here; its different faces and flavours, and how different people ‘deal’ with it, respond to it. But Age of Ash never quite crosses the line into depressing, although I think it skirts that; both Alys and Sammish live hand-to-mouth, and Abraham doesn’t try to dress up poverty or make it palatable – but he doesn’t make it pitiable, either. He walks that tightrope deftly, managing not to turn their struggles into any kind of saintly martyrdom or turn them into some kind of misery-porn. It’s just life. Bare and unfair, but what can you do except keep putting one foot in front of the other?

And then Alys and Sammish get pulled into the very edges, the shallowest depths, of that central secret, and so much changes and so much doesn’t.

It was like seeing someone in a gilt mask shaped like a wolf, and then removing it to discover they’d been a panther all along.

I don’t know what to say about this book, how to describe it. What I’ve written is so vague it tells you almost nothing, and maybe that’s because, if you wrote out the plot points on paper, there aren’t very many of them. This isn’t an action-heavy book, and it’s not fast-paced. Most of what changes, almost all of it, is what’s inside the characters, not their surroundings, their city. This is a story about the underside of a weaving, the tangled knots and threads that almost no one can see, but that are fundamental to the tapestry. It’s about very, very normal, real people, and balancing the need for bread or a safe place to sleep with thwarting wicked schemes. It’s about drawing the line and saying enough: to those in power, to those who want power, to your friends. It’s about how people, not just cities and the rivers that run through them, can have hidden, unexpected depths in them, and no one can predict what will come out what those depths are tapped.

It’s about fighting back not because of ethics or ideology, but out of stubbornness and spite and fuck you is why. It’s about what the hell fighting even looks like, when you’re powerless and poor and have no idea where to start.

It’s about: how much can one person – one overlooked, sleeping-in-alleys person – make a difference?

A little. A lot. None.

All.

Something about wanting it that badly felt like a crime.

I loved it. If you’re willing to wait for the cinematic showdowns – if you can accept that this is just the opening move, not the endgame – I think you’ll love it too.

Age of Ash comes out on Feb 15. You’ve still got time to preorder!

The post A Quiet Beginning: Age of Ash by Daniel Abraham appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Sickening Brilliance: Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin
Representation: Sapphic trans woman MC, bi/pansexual trans woman MC, Indigenous American trans man MC, brown bi/pansexual fat MC with chronic pain, queer cis woman MC
Published on: 22nd February 2022
Genres: Horror, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
ISBN: 1250794641
Goodreads

Y: The Last Man meets The Girl With All the Gifts in Gretchen Felker-Martin's Manhunt, an explosive post-apocalyptic novel that follows trans women and men on a grotesque journey of survival.

Beth and Fran spend their days traveling the ravaged New England coast, hunting feral men and harvesting their organs in a gruesome effort to ensure they'll never face the same fate.

Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned motto: other people aren't safe.

After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of survivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat, and awkward relationship dynamics—all while outrunning packs of feral men, and their own demons.

Manhunt is a timely, powerful response to every gender-based apocalypse story that failed to consider the existence of transgender and non-binary people, from a powerful new voice in horror.

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.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-02-03T20:07:00+00:00", "description": "Manhunt hits you like a brick at Stonewall.", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/sickening-brilliance-manhunt-by-gretchen-felker-martin\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "Manhunt", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Gretchen Felker-Martin", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "1250794641" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": 5, "bestRating": "5" }} Highlights

~if you have a virus that takes out all men…what happens to trans people???
~this book has something for everyone!
~discomfort. the something is discomfort. this book has something to make everyone uncomfortable.
~when it comes to the apocalypse and everything else TERFs = cockroaches
~one (1) Elton John reference

adjective: sickening

1. causing or liable to cause a feeling of nausea or disgust.
2. amazing, great, perfect (slang)

This is very much a queer as in fuck you book.

And it’s fucking amazing.

Manhunt is as gloriously, defiantly provocative as the first brick at Stonewall, with just as much wrath and fierce pride and we have had ENOUGH behind it. This is a book that revels in its queerness and demands you look that queerness in the eye; not the carefully palatable, sexless, domesticated LGBTQ+-ness of a certain kind of cis white gay man or woman, but the raw messy uncensored queerness that makes so many people so very uncomfortable. Manhunt is equally graphic in gore and grime and fucking; threads of saliva joining two mouths; pus and blood; sweat and ugly crying; kink that isn’t dressed up nice and pretty for an audience but is sticky, clumsy, awkward, complicated, honest.

The monsters and the sex are described with exactly the same kind of uncompromising, meaty graphic detail, and I don’t for one second think that’s an accident. Not when the real world often has an easier time with horror-story monsters than the thought of trans sexuality, or fat people fucking, or the raw messiness of kink that’s not been polished up for a Hollywood screen. Felker-Martin brings the two – monsters, and trans people having sex – side-by-side, portrays them the same way to force you, the reader, to compare them. To acknowledge that they’re not the same, not for one fucking second, and if you’re feeling revulsion for both maybe think about why that is.

Are you uncomfortable yet?

You always could have done something, he thought… You were just afraid to be uncomfortable.

Manhunt is unequivocally anti-TERF, but it’s not satisfied with the progressive Left, either. The condemnation of open transphobia is only a little more intense than the contempt and fury directed at the kind of allies who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk, who use progressive, politically-correct language to dress up their discomfort and/or unwillingness to act on the behalf of trans people as Rational and Fair, when it couldn’t be less so – the kind of ‘allies’ who use that same language as a weapon against trans people when they most need help and support. Who don’t work to oppose and dismantle transphobia, and turn blind eyes when TERF bullshit then gets trans people hurt or killed.

There are multiple flavours of evil to choose from here; the mindless New Men, made honest monsters by the virus; the TERFs, out to kill every trans woman and ‘gender traitor’ they can find; and everyone who turns a blind eye, who is willing to trade principles for (perceived) safety, who compromises with TERFs rather than burning them out like the rot they are.

That was what scared her. The women who stayed silent.

The monsters and the TERFs and the hypocrites. Which are worse? The monsters aren’t in control of themselves…and the TERFs wouldn’t exist if the hypocrites didn’t let them.

Can you tell Manhunt left me with some pretty intense Feels?

Not for the first time, Beth wondered if they were lonely, those things that had been men. If they missed their wives, their mothers, their daughters and girlfriends and dominatrixes. Or maybe they were happy now, free to rape and kill and eat whomever, free to shit and piss and jerk off in the street.

Maybe this world was the one they’d always wanted.

I’m not going to talk to you about the plot; the book’s blurb covers that pretty well, and there are a lot of other reviews that go into detail on that. What I want to talk about is a central aspect of the premise that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

See, with this apocalyptic virus, anybody with too much testosterone – obviously mostly cis men, but plenty of cis women with various health issues too – transform into some of the most genuinely horrifying monsters I’ve ever seen.

New men, she thought, gripping the gutter and bracing a foot against the wall. Like Coke Zero. Same great vicious disregard for our lives, none of the socially enforced restraint!

This puts trans women, and many other nonbinary people, into a desperately terrifying situation; if they don’t get estrogen, the virus will get them, and in this post-apocalyptic society, you can’t exactly go get a prescription – or even buy pills or shots on the black market. There are some plants that can help – licorice root, for example – and one more effective but extremely dangerous source that the manhunters procure. But none of it’s 100% safe; if you need estrogen, you’re only one or two bad days or accidents away from potentially getting hit by the virus.

In the real world, there is no reason to be afraid, and therefore hate, trans women (or any other kind of nonbinary person). A trans woman is no kind of threat to anybody or anything, and anyone with working braincells can see that.

In Manhunt, though – in Manhunt, the fear isn’t completely unjustified. When a group kicks out their trans woman housemate, it’s because they’re fucking terrified she might turn into a monster. Which – she might. If something goes wrong, if she doesn’t get enough estrogen. One of the first things we learn from Beth and Fran is that every winter, when all they have are the supplies they’ve stored up throughout the rest of the year, they always start to experience the first symptoms of the virus. Every winter. They’ve survived so far, but. That’s pretty fucking frightening, for them, and for anyone who might be around them at the time.

This is a book that, in every possible way, is out to make you uncomfortable. But it is a whole different level of horror to have to sit with the awareness that – yeah. I’d be scared too, if my housemate, my friend, my neighbour might turn into a monster.

Reader, I did not enjoy that one bit. I didn’t, and don’t, want to be like those characters in the book who abandoned or forced out the people most at risk. And I believe that, despite being scared, I wouldn’t do what they did.

But I don’t know for sure. You never know for sure what you’d do when it’s life or death – or the risk of it – until you’re in that moment. So I believe. But I don’t know.

Telling yourself what to feel is a brick wrapped up in silk: it looks pretty, but it hurts the same.

Manhunt is all about making you look at all the aspects of transness – and the things we associate with it, like sex, because gods forbid we quit fetishizing trans people, or insisting they’re only faking so the men they really are can go be pervs in a woman’s bathroom – that make us uncomfortable, that we flinch away from, gloss over, don’t mention at the dinner table even if we’re supposedly capital-a Allies.

But that also means acknowledging that these things make us uncomfortable. In making us look so closely at the messy parts of transness, Felker-Martin is also making us look in the mirror. Why does x or y (hah) make us uncomfortable? What does that mean? Is it fair to feel that way? Is it prudish? Is it deeply buried prejudices we didn’t know we had?

I don’t know. But I’ll be thinking about it for a very long time.

To circle back to my previous point, though – Felker-Martin has created a set-up where it’s understandable and kind of fair to be scared of trans women. Which confused the hell out of me – justifying transphobia?! I don’t think Felker-Martin gives a fuck about precedent and messages and Art Must Be Moral, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it. The TERFs and those willing to work with them are terrible people who do unforgivable things. I didn’t want to sympathise with their fear! (See above: this book making me fucking uncomfortable about myself and my sympathies.)

I wrestled with it for ages…but I think I might have worked it out. And if I’m right, it’s actually deceptively simple.

a) The TERFs don’t do what they do out of fear; it’s hate. And in Manhunt, that hate isn’t really about the virus at all. It’s all shit that these people thought before – they’re just using the virus as an excuse to act on their hate now.

b) Even if it is understandable to be afraid that a trans woman might get hit by the virus, and turn into a monster – there are different ways to respond to that fear. The proper one, the correct one, would be to work your ass off to make sure she has a steady, safe supply of estrogen – not kick her out of your house.

c) There is a huge difference between a potential monster and a real, actual, right-now monster. And the people who act on their fear – and hate – by abandoning, abusing, hunting, and murdering trans women?

They’re not potential monsters. They’re right-now monsters. And it’s not a virus that’s done that to them – unless it’s the virus of hate they made and spread themselves.

We see over the course of the book several places, several communities, that are not afraid of trans women; that just work to make sure that they get the estrogen they need. And that’s it. Fear neutralised and un-justified. Voila. Trans women are only threatened by the virus when they’re cast out and alone; backed and supported, they’re no threat to anyone. And being backed and supported by their community is what they deserve, because every human deserves that.

Maybe that works as commentary for real-world transphobia too: things are only scary when they’re Othered. We see maybe-monsters (where there fucking aren’t any) and cast them out, and the distance we’ve created is what makes them frightening. And the cure for that is to invite them in and stand beside them – and fight the TERFs on the fucking beaches.

Community is when you never let go of each other. Not even after you’re gone.

Manhunt is in no way a preachy book – you don’t have to care about queer politics/ethics/whatever; you don’t have to read a deeper message into it if you don’t want to. This functions just as well – excellently – without any of that; as ‘just’ an intense, addictive horror novel, one as guaranteed to turn your stomach as it is to keep you turning pages. It’s queer as fuck, and it’s messy and complicated except for the parts that aren’t complicated at all; every single character is so damn human that it hurts, even the ones whose eyes you want to rip out and stomp on. Good gods, Felker-Martin knows what she’s doing: I’ve always called myself a wimp when it comes to horror, but it didn’t matter how disgusted or freaked I was, or how horrible the mental images she painted in my head were; I couldn’t stop reading (even when I actually tried). It just wasn’t possible to walk away from Beth, from Fran, from Robbie, from Indi, from the whole horrible situation they were in from the first page to the last.

And there’s this…wry, dark humour that threads its way through everything, so that sometimes in the midst of something that makes you want to scream or cry or throw up, you end up choking on a laugh instead.

A real Pinterest board of a house,

It feels legit, is the thing. They’re the kind of jokes survivors make, the gallows humour you laugh at because gods, you’ve been there – while everyone else in the room winces because you can’t say that! or how can you make fun of this?!, shock-horror-gasp. And yes, I winced too a few times, but…if you’ve gone through hell and come out the other side – or if you’re still in it – sometimes your sense of humour gets twisted, and you say things that are outrageous, but everyone who’s been there laugh as well. I don’t know how to put it any better than that.

The same note of oh, she gets it! rings true for Indi, a cis woman who is a doctor and fat and has terrible chronic pain. I don’t know if I have a favourite character, but I adored Indi, probably because she’s ridiculously smart and has to put up with idiots far too often in order to take care of her friends. One very simple line just shocked through me, as someone who lives with chronic pain myself;

Indi pulled another smile out of the drawer.

Yes. That. That’s exactly what it’s like.

With all the different characters… I loved how Felker-Martin makes it so clear that there is no trans monolith; that things are not the same for femmes and bricks, that no trans person is a ‘good queer’ (whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean), that different trans people want different things – that different trans people are different, full stop. That being some flavour of queer does not make you an ally; that some of the worst transphobia comes from within the queer community. And that, gods, cis women are not sweet magical angels; the worst thing you can think of done by a man? A woman can do it too, can match evil for evil and viciousness for viciousness. Women aren’t intrinsically better. Matriarchy isn’t any better than a patriarchy, it just changes who’s on top.

“What we’re doing to them…” Her voice was a ragged croak not much louder than a whisper. “It’s just the same shit men did to us before.”

I said Manhunt isn’t preachy, and I meant it. Felker-Martin doesn’t lecture the reader. She just drops you into the middle of this post-apocalyptic nightmare and shows you how it could be so much worse than you ever imagined. It’s sickening and defiant and incisive as a bullet; it’s brutal and bitter and brilliant. It will rip your heart out and eat it. It will definitely keep you up at night. No matter what angle you’re coming at it from, there will be something to horrify you; the body-horror Felker-Martin revels in, or the psychological nightmare of it all, or literally everything about the TERFs – or maybe the fact that not for one second did this ever feel like a satire.

Are you feeling uncomfortable yet?

Manhunt is a queer-as-fuck horror novel that doesn’t play nice and pulls no punches; that is sickening in every sense of the word; that puts trans people front-and-center in a gender-divide apocalypse; that shows you a nightmare you can’t look away from and a mirror you’ll want to smash. It is, without question, one of the best books not just of the year, but the decade.

It comes out on Feb 22nd. Preorder it immediately – you don’t want to miss this one.

The post Sickening Brilliance: Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

I Can’t Wait For…Mage of Fools by Eugen Bacon

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 is Mage of Fools by Eugen Bacon!

Mage of Fools by Eugen Bacon
Representation: African setting & cast
Published on: 15th March 2022
Genres: Fantasy
Goodreads

In the dystopian world of Mafinga, Jasmin must contend with a dictator’s sorcerer to cleanse the socialist state of its deadly pollution.

Mafinga's malevolent king dislikes books and, together with his sorcerer Atari, has collapsed the environment to almost uninhabitable. The sun has killed all the able men, including Jasmin’s husband Godi.

But Jasmin has Godi’s secret story machine that tells of a better world, far different from the wastelands of Mafinga. Jasmin’s crime for possessing the machine and its forbidden literature filled with subversive text is punishable by death.

Fate grants a cruel reprieve in the service of a childless queen who claims Jasmin’s children as her own. Jasmin is powerless—until she discovers secrets behind the king and his sorcerer.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-02-02T20:50:41+00:00", "description": "A secret story machine in a kingdom where books are banned.", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/i-cant-wait-for-mage-of-fools-by-eugen-bacon\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "Mage of Fools", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Eugen Bacon", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

Mage of Fools sounds very strange, very different from what I usually find myself reading – and incredibly interesting. A land without men – worse, a land without BOOKS??? (Could the story machine be a book? That seems too simple, especially since it sounds like the machine contains literature, which means it can’t be a piece of literature itself…?)

The early reviews on Goodreads say that this set in a mystical African kingdom, which raises my hopes that there are fantasy elements worked into the dystopian setting. ‘Mystical’ = magic, right? And the title is literally Mage of Fools… But it may be that this is one of those stories where science or trickery is masquerading as magic (I’m not about to trust the king’s sorcerer to be what he claims to be!) and that will still be something I want to read!

What bookwyrm isn’t in love with stories about the power of stories??? And I’m flat-out feral for parents out to save their kids, okay? I need Jasmin to get her children back – and preferably take down the monarchy in the process!

Finally, I’m really excited by all the praise for Bacon’s prose! I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but prose matters to me so much more than story – I just can’t enjoy a book, no matter how fantastic the premise or plot or characters, if I don’t click with the writing style. But it sounds like Bacon’s style is exactly what I most love, which means Mage of Fools officially ticks all my boxes, and I can’t wait to get to read it!

What’s your Can’t-Wait-For book this week?

The post I Can’t Wait For…Mage of Fools by Eugen Bacon appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Snuggle-Fantasy With Depth & Teeth: Good Neighbours (The Full Collection) by Stephanie Burgis

Good Neighbors: The Full Collection by Stephanie Burgis
Representation: Secondary sapphic character, secondary bi/pansexual character, secondary M/M
Published on: 2nd February 2022
Genres: Fantasy
ISBN: B09BS2JS1J
Goodreads

When a grumpy inventor meets her outrageous new neighbor in the big black castle down the road, more than one type of spark will fly!

Mia Brandt knows better than to ever again allow her true powers to be discovered. Ever since her last neighbors burned down her workshop in a night of terror and flame, she's been determined to stay solitary, safe, and - to all outside appearances - perfectly respectable...

But Leander Fabian, whose sinister castle looms over her cozy new cottage, has far more dangerous ideas in mind. When he persuades Mia into a reluctant alliance, she finds herself swept into an exhilarating world of midnight balls, interfering countesses, illicit opera house expeditions, necromantic duels, and a whole unnatural community of fellow magic-workers and outcasts, all of whom are facing a terrifying threat.

Luckily, Mia has unnatural powers of her own - but even her unique skills may not be enough to protect her new found family and help her resist the wickedly provoking neighbor who's seen through all of her shields from the beginning.

This novel-length collection includes all four stories and novellas originally published on Stephanie Burgis's Patreon in 2020-2021: Good Neighbors, Deadly Courtesies, Fine Deceptions, and Fierce Company.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-02-01T20:21:57+00:00", "description": "A sweet and funny book that's equal parts fun and meaningful!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/snuggle-fantasy-with-depth-teeth-good-neighbours-the-full-collection-by-stephanie-burgis\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "Good Neighbors: The Full Collection", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Stephanie Burgis", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "B09BS2JS1J" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": 4, "bestRating": "5" }}

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

Highlights

~finally a heroine who hates socializing as much as I do!!!
~necromancers are dedicated to the Aesthetic
~weaponised jewelry
~allies = heart-eyes
~THERE’S ONLY ONE BED

Okay.

Look.

Listen.

I opened up Good Neighbours (the omnibus, made up of a short story and three novellas previously published on Burgis’ Patreon) expecting fluff and silliness and a book I could just relax into. You know – the kind of book that is pure escapism and fun and has you grinning at the pages as you turn them.

Dad had always said I was a battering ram when it came to polite conversation.

And Good Neighbours has and is all of those things! There is fluff and silliness GALORE! There are undead monsters that are really more like puppies, and deserve all the petting and walkies they want; there are necromancers who are so very Extra they’ll have you cackling; there is delightful use of the Fake Marriage trope (with bonus there’s only one bed!); there is OPERA! And as usual, Burgis’ writing is just a relief to a tired or grey-feeling brain; it’s light and brisk and doesn’t make you work hard to keep up with what’s happening, without being so simplistic it becomes childish or boring.

When you’re just feeling knackered and overworked and, you know, *waves vaguely at everything*, you don’t want a big heavy book that demands you make your way through a mental labyrinth and possibly defeat a minotaur in order to properly appreciate it. You want a book that holds your hand and leads you along gently to somewhere interesting, and that’s exactly what Good Neighbours does.

“Lead the way,” I told him.

He grinned in the dancing light of my flame. “Mia, all you ever have to do is ask.”

Like I said: a relief.

But it would be very wrong of me to leave you with the impression that Good Neighbours is only fluffy. Not that there would be anything wrong with it if it were, but the fact is that it’s not. And I should have realised that much sooner, because in the very beginning, we’re introduced to Mia’s father, who is permanently disabled after the occupants of their old home village came to burn their house down – and that’s not a fluff thing, even if Mia has made him supernaturally-good leg supports to help him manage mostly-normally. But I didn’t immediately realise that Burgis was telling a deeper story under the surface of the candy-floss one, and the head’s-up of Mia’s dad slipped past me.

The candy-floss story is: a grumpy (shy) metal-mage teams up with her neighbour, a necromancer, who is Very Pretty And Suave, to make a stand against the people of the nearby town: no, we won’t be driven off with pitchforks and torches! And, of course, said metal-mage and necromancer get caught up in Shenanigans and catch Feels for each other along the way (a way involving battle-necklaces and secret tunnels and only one bed!!!) and it all ends Happily Ever After!

Which: it does! But Good Neighbours is also about facing and overcoming past traumas, about refusing to apologise for who you are, about doing the right thing even when it might be dangerous, and shoving back hard against hate. It’s about working together, even with people who are very different from you – it’s about how people who might seem very different from you aren’t, really! And, maybe most importantly, it’s about how the ones spewing – or buying into – hate are the minority, and the rest of us don’t have to put up with it.

Honestly, it reminds me very much of Burgis’ MG books, which are also fun while managing to be deep and meaningful. (Don’t ask me how she manages it; I’m starting to think it’s got to be magic.) It’s not moralistic and preachy; it’s just that the kind of shenanigans Burgis’ characters tend to get into…they’re not meaningless mischief. They’re not silly, even if they’re dressed up in silly costumes. They matter.

“If doing the right thing counts as betraying the family, then we have the wrong family,

I’m really not exaggerating – especially towards the end of the book, in the final novella, there were lines that made me ache with emotion, and others that gave me goosebump-thrills. It packed so much punch, completely unexpectedly; touching on topics heavy enough that I still don’t understand how Burgis managed to write about them here without losing the light-and-fun vibe.

Allies fought by each other’s sides, but they didn’t steal each other’s battles.

It’s a fierce and hopeful little book; under all the soft fluffiness, Good Neighbours has sharp teeth, and while it’s all sweet and cuddly for the reader, it is definitely baring those teeth at the world. Daring it to try and snuff out this firefly-flame.

But if anyone does try? Mia will just make a new one – and the next one will be even brighter and fiercer.

Good Neighbours: The Full Collection is out tomorrow. I strongly recommend nabbing yourself a copy!

The post Snuggle-Fantasy With Depth & Teeth: Good Neighbours (The Full Collection) by Stephanie Burgis appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

In Short: January

This month felt ridiculously hectic, and I had a lot of trouble focussing and getting any writing done. Blegh. I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to, but all in all I still didn’t do too badly.

Read[image error]

Twenty books this month – not bad! Although a bunch of them are novellas. Still counts! My highlights were definitely The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales (the first edition, which had a bunch of stories that weren’t in the trad-published edition!); Inda, which I actually managed to review; The Hourglass Throne, which I’ll probably reread at least four more times before I have the words to review it; Manhunt, which, jesus christ, but also, fucking WOW; and Among Others, which was a comfort re-read. The last time I read it was before all my own chronic crap/disabilities kicked in, so I empathised a lot more with Mori’s disability this time around.

On the flip side, The Four Profound Weaves was a let-down, despite how much I’ve enjoyed the short stories set in the same verse; and SongBroken was a fucking transphobic trainwreck I’d like to throw out a window.

After a lot of thinking about it, I’ve decided I’m not going to track the books I read by gender identity or sexuality anymore. For one thing, I hate feeling like a creepy stalker trying to find out those details about someone; for another thing, I will never be 100% correct, not least because plenty of people stay in the closet and they are allowed to do so; and finally: I am simply not of the opinion that you have to be queer to write a queer character. Which I know isn’t the reason people track how many queer authors they’re reading – it’s about boosting queer authors – but that’s what the whole #ownvoices thing feels like to me, so. Not doing that anymore.

Whereas I think there are a lot of very good and valid reasons to pay attention to how many BIPOC authors you read, so I’m gonna keep doing that. Thus, this month 35% of the books I read were by BIPOC authors. That’s much better than the 16% of November, which was the last month I tracked!

Reviewed

Four real reviews; five DNF ones. I’m not in love with the reviews I’ve been writing lately, even when I love the books, and I’m feeling pretty depressed and demotivated. But nine reviews in one month is way more than I expected, especially since this month was so busy. I was working on two cover reveals! (One of which I cancelled with prejudice.) It’ll do.

(My review for Age of Ash will go live on the 5th!)

DNF-ed

I wrote about all of these in my monthly DNF post. No need to go over them all again!

ARCs Received[image error][image error]

I… What??? What??? WHAT???

Not only is SIXTEEN an ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS number of ARCs, I am genuinely breathless at being approved for so many of my most-wished-for books! SO MANY! A few of these actually brought me to tears (happy ones! EXTREMELY HAPPY ONES!) Looking at all the covers together like this, I’m just completely stunned.

The other thing that’s hit me like a baseball bat made of glitter and cake: this month has been the first time authors and publishers have been reaching out to me to ask if I wanted to review something, rather than the other way around! o.o I…honestly, I still don’t know what to do with that. Every Book a Doorway is still a baby blog in my eyes, you know? Not very slick and professional or quotes-worthy, generally. I’M NOT BIG ENOUGH OR IMPORTANT ENOUGH FOR THIS!

Nobody tell ’em though, I’m not giving the ARCs back!

Mine!!!

Apparently, people notice if you cheerlead the hell out of a book on twitter with lots of unironic caps-lock and sparkly gifs. Which delights me utterly! But still takes me aback. PEOPLE – IMPORTANT PEOPLE – NOTICED MY CAPS-LOCK?!

I say again: WHAT???

People were PAYING ATTENTION?!

I do need to write a bit about the situation with The Atlas Six, because honestly that was a whole different flavour of ridiculous: I actually had a copy of the first, self-published edition, and had almost finished it when I decided to request an ARC of the new edition. I wanted to see what had changed! But when I got it, I didn’t find any new content – which was when I discovered that the ebook version of the new edition is already available outside the US. So I bought it and read that. Overly complicated, much? (I did enjoy it, though, which I’ll write about soon-ish!)

I only have a few currently outstanding requests for ARCs now, and even if they all get approved, that’s most of the books I’m interested in this year. So. Hopefully I can spread them out over the year and not get overwhelmed???

Who am I kidding I’M ALREADY OVERWHELMED AHHHHHHHHHHHH

ARCs Outstanding[image error][image error]

NINE IS A LOT. Although at least I have actually finished a few of these; I’m just struggling on how the hell to verbalise their epicness, when all I want to do is just write a page of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!s for each of them!

Rec Lists & Misc[image error][image error]

I added another four books to my Unmissable SFF of 2022 – The Moonday Letters, which is the latest of Emmi Itäranta’s books to be translated into English; Langmead’s Glitterati, which promises an opulent utopia with ‘unbreakable rules for how to eat ice cream’ (I have no idea what that means, but I want!!!); Sanctuary by Andi C. Buchanan, which is packed full of queerness and neurodivergence and is about a place that’s effectively an animal shelter, but for ghosts!; and Darknesses, an F/F take on Dracula with Black vampires – I genuinely don’t need to hear any more than that!

FAR MORE IMPORTANTLY: I was part of the cover reveal for The Hourglass Throne by KD Edwards – the latest book in one of my most-favouritest series! I am heart-eyes forever.

Looking Forward

Next month is so busy; not just in terms of new releases I’m excited about (OF WHICH THERE ARE MANY) but also, I have so many reviews to finish!!! It’s just kind of difficult to put into words the sheer awesomeness of some of these, you know?

Of the books I haven’t already read/have ARCs of, I’m most excited for Bitter, The Embroidered Book, and Dead Collections. BUT GODS DAMN, FEBURARY IS PACKED FULL OF INCREDIBLE BOOKS!

ONWARDS TO FEB, I SAY!

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

Must-Have Monday #71

This week we have SIX books to feature – five SFF, and one collection of historical fiction short stories!

Base Notes by Lara Elena Donnelly
Representation: Nonbinary MC
Published on: 1st February 2022
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Goodreads

A lasting impression is worth killing for in this intoxicating novel about memories and murder by the author of the Amberlough Dossier series.

In New York City everybody needs a side hustle, and perfumer Vic Fowler has developed a delicate art that has proved to be very lucrative: creating bespoke scents that evoke immersive memories—memories that, for Vic’s clients, are worth killing for. But the city is expensive, and these days even artisanal murder doesn’t pay the bills. When Joseph Eisner, a former client with deep pockets, offers Vic an opportunity to expand the enterprise, the money is too good to turn down. But the job is too intricate—and too dangerous—to attempt alone.

Manipulating fellow struggling artists into acting as accomplices is easy. Like Vic, they too are on the verge of burnout and bankruptcy. But as relationships become more complicated, Vic’s careful plans start to unravel. Hounded by guilt and a tenacious private investigator, Vic grows increasingly desperate to complete Eisner’s commission. Is there anyone—friends, lovers, coconspirators—that Vic won’t sacrifice for art?

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-01-31T11:53:00+00:00", "description": "SIX books this week, ranging from perfumes that embody memories to Persian fantasy to annoyingly charming necromancers!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/must-have-monday-71\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "Base Notes", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Lara Elena Donnelly", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

I loved the Amberlough Dossier, and even though this is by all accounts VERY different, it still made it onto my Unmissable SFF of 2022 list! Perfumes and scents have always interested me, and I’m not going to lie, I really love the idea of an amoral nonbinary perfumer being terrible. That’s exactly what I’m in the mood for right now! (It’s a weird mood. Sue me!)

This Woven Kingdom (This Woven Kingdom, #1) by Tahereh Mafi
Representation: Persian-coded cast
Published on: 1st February 2022
Genres: Fantasy
Goodreads

Clashing empires, forbidden romance, and a long-forgotten queen destined to save her people—bestselling author Tahereh Mafi’s first in an epic, romantic trilogy inspired by Persian mythology.

To all the world, Alizeh is a disposable servant, not the long-lost heir to an ancient Jinn kingdom forced to hide in plain sight.

The crown prince, Kamran, has heard the prophecies foretelling the death of his king. But he could never have imagined that the servant girl with the strange eyes, the girl he can’t put out of his mind, would one day soon uproot his kingdom—and the world.

Perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo, Tomi Adeyemi, and Sabaa Tahir, this is the explosive first book in a new fantasy trilogy from the New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-nominated author Tahereh Mafi.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-01-31T11:53:00+00:00", "description": "SIX books this week, ranging from perfumes that embody memories to Persian fantasy to annoyingly charming necromancers!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/must-have-monday-71\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "This Woven Kingdom (This Woven Kingdom, #1)", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Tahereh Mafi", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

Mafi’s debut Shatter Me was incredibly dear to teen!Sia, and I was dazzled by the gorgeous whimsy of her MG books. I can’t even begin to imagine how gorgeous a Persian-inspired fantasy from her is going to be!

Azura Ghost (The Graven, #2) by Essa Hansen
Published on: 1st February 2022
Genres: Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Goodreads

Following Nophek Gloss comes the second book in this highly imaginative new space opera trilogy by debut author Essa Hansen - an action-packed adventure perfect for fans of Star Wars, Children of Time and A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.

Caiden has been on the run for ten years with his unique starship in order to keep his adversary, Threi, imprisoned. But when an old friend he'd once thought dead reappears, he is lured into a game of cat and mouse with the one person whose powers rival Threi's: Threi's sister Abriss.

Now with both siblings on the hunt for Caiden and his ship, Caiden must rescue his long-lost friend from their clutches and uncover the source of both his ship's power and his own origins in order to stop Abriss's plan to collapse the multiverse.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-01-31T11:53:00+00:00", "description": "SIX books this week, ranging from perfumes that embody memories to Persian fantasy to annoyingly charming necromancers!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/must-have-monday-71\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "Azura Ghost (The Graven, #2)", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Essa Hansen", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

This was another book on my Unmissable list…but then I DNF-ed the ARC. I’m still including it because I hope there are other readers who will love it – and maybe at some point I can try reading it again and will love it then??? I hope so.

The Wall by Sarah Jane Singer
Representation: Bisexual MC
Published on: 1st February 2022
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Goodreads

Julia has lived her whole life inside the Wall, the shining fortress her father built. But she dreams of knowing the world, and one day, the world calls to her. She runs away from home with a false name, a magical gift from her ailing mother, and her lion companion. But leaving triggers a curse, and no matter how hard she tries to outrun it, it catches up with her—as curses often do.

Now, with only the help of a mysterious archer she meets along her journey, Julia must confront dark magic, uncover the secrets of her mother’s past and her own abilities, and discover who she is outside of the Wall, if she is ever to survive the curse and build a life of her own.

Fans of Naomi Novik and Laura E. Weymouth will love Sarah Jane Singer’s lyrical, adventurous debut novel.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-01-31T11:53:00+00:00", "description": "SIX books this week, ranging from perfumes that embody memories to Persian fantasy to annoyingly charming necromancers!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/must-have-monday-71\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "The Wall", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Sarah Jane Singer", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

I very nearly missed this! Which would have been a shame, since it sounds marvellous – a lion companion?! I would happily jump in for that alone, but all the early reviews have been delighted with The Wall too. Definitely giving it a go!

[image error]Althingi: The Crescent and the Northern Star by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, Josh Gillingham
Representation: Middle-Eastern MCs
Published on: 1st February 2022
Goodreads

In our increasingly polarized world there is an urgent need for cross-cultural conversations, bridges of understanding between people of different beliefs, and a recommitment to a common understanding of our shared history: the history not of any one particular group but of humanity itself. Althingi: The Crescent and the Northern Star, co-edited by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad (A Mosque Among the Stars, Islamicates) and Joshua Gillingham (The Gatewatch, Old Norse for Modern Times), is an anthology of historical fiction which explores the intricate and often-overlooked interactions between intrepid Viking voyagers and inquisitive emissaries from the powerful Islamic kingdoms. Featuring stories by an incredible slate of authors writing in the historical Althingi universe, Althingi: The Crescent and the Northern Star offers a glimpse into a fascinating forgotten past and will prove a must-read for fans of both Viking and Islamic history.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-01-31T11:53:00+00:00", "description": "SIX books this week, ranging from perfumes that embody memories to Persian fantasy to annoyingly charming necromancers!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/must-have-monday-71\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "Althingi: The Crescent and the Northern Star", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, Josh Gillingham", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

In my opinion, historical fiction and spec-fic aren’t very distant cousins, and this one definitely caught my attention. I love the premise, and I’m really interested to see how all these authors present different takes on the interactions between Vikings and the ancient Islamic world!

Good Neighbors: The Full Collection by Stephanie Burgis
Published on: 2nd February 2022
Genres: Fantasy
Goodreads

When a grumpy inventor meets her outrageous new neighbor in the big black castle down the road, more than one type of spark will fly!

Mia Brandt knows better than to ever again allow her true powers to be discovered. Ever since her last neighbors burned down her workshop in a night of terror and flame, she's been determined to stay solitary, safe, and - to all outside appearances - perfectly respectable...

But Leander Fabian, whose sinister castle looms over her cozy new cottage, has far more dangerous ideas in mind. When he persuades Mia into a reluctant alliance, she finds herself swept into an exhilarating world of midnight balls, interfering countesses, illicit opera house expeditions, necromantic duels, and a whole unnatural community of fellow magic-workers and outcasts, all of whom are facing a terrifying threat.

Luckily, Mia has unnatural powers of her own - but even her unique skills may not be enough to protect her new found family and help her resist the wickedly provoking neighbor who's seen through all of her shields from the beginning.

This novel-length collection includes all four stories and novellas originally published on Stephanie Burgis's Patreon in 2020-2021: Good Neighbors, Deadly Courtesies, Fine Deceptions, and Fierce Company.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-01-31T11:53:00+00:00", "description": "SIX books this week, ranging from perfumes that embody memories to Persian fantasy to annoyingly charming necromancers!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/must-have-monday-71\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "Good Neighbors: The Full Collection", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Stephanie Burgis", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

Stephanie Burgis writes excellent ‘hot chocolate books’ – fantasies that are cozy-feeling even when they also include adventures and other shenanigans – and this one is a collection of short stories and novellas she’s been writing on her Patreon. I’ve read the first part so far, which made me grin a lot, and I’m hoping to have a review up for the whole thing later this week!

That’s all I’ve got! Did I miss any books I should know about? Will you be reading any of these? Let me know!

The post Must-Have Monday #71 appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

January DNFs

Only four DNFs this month – one less than December! That’s good, right? Less-good: they were all ARCs.

Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot
Representation: Lesbian MC, F/F
Published on: 8th February 2022
Genres: Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
ISBN: 0857669664
Goodreads

Lesbian gunslinger fights spies in space!

Three factions vie for control of the galaxy. Rig, a gunslinging, thieving, rebel with a cause, doesn’t give a damn about them and she hasn’t looked back since abandoning her faction three years ago.

That is, until her former faction sends her a message: return what she stole from them, or they’ll kill her twin sister.

Rig embarks on a journey across the galaxy to save her sister – but for once she’s not alone. She has help from her network of resistance contacts, her taser-wielding librarian girlfriend, and a mysterious bounty hunter.

If Rig fails and her former faction finds what she stole from them, trillions of lives will be lost--including her sister's. But if she succeeds, she might just pull the whole damn faction system down around their ears. Either way, she’s going to do it with panache and pizzazz.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-01-30T12:58:00+00:00", "description": "All my DNFs this month - fewer than in December!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/january-dnfs\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "Bluebird", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Ciel Pierlot", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "0857669664" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

I think it says everything that needs saying that I had to pause and go look up the title of this book – I couldn’t remember it.

I wouldn’t call Bluebird a bad book, but it’s definitely not a me-book. I found it too simplistic – both in plot and in prose – even as it tried to delve deep into complicated and messy topics, like Rig’s past as a weapons-designer, or the awfulness of colonisation. Bluebird wants to be funny and wants to be serious, with the result that it doesn’t really manage either one.

I can see this being a good, fun read when you want something easy and fun that doesn’t ask you to think too hard, but it doesn’t have the escapism that I want from my easy-and-fun books, so. Alas, doesn’t work for me.

Crowbones (The World of the Others, #3; The Others, #8) by Anne Bishop
Published on: 8th March 2022
Genres: Fantasy
ISBN: 0593337336
Goodreads

In this engrossing and gripping fantasy set in the world of the New York Times bestselling Others series, an inn owner and her friends must find a killer—before it’s too late.…

Crowbones will gitcha if you don’t watch out!

Deep in the territory controlled by the Others—shape-shifters, vampires, and even deadlier paranormal beings—Vicki DeVine has made a new life for herself running The Jumble, a rustic resort. When she decides to host a gathering of friends and guests for Trickster Night, at first everything is going well between the humans and the Others.
But then someone arrives dressed as Crowbones, the Crowgard bogeyman. When the impostor is killed along with a shape-shifting Crow, and the deaths are clearly connected, everyone fears that the real Crowbones may have come to The Jumble—and that could mean serious trouble.

To “encourage” humans to help them find some answers, the Elders and Elementals close all the roads, locking in suspects and victims alike. Now Vicki, human police chief Grimshaw, vampire lawyer Ilya Sanguinati, and the rest of their friends have to figure out who is manipulating events designed to pit humans against Others—and who may have put Vicki DeVine in the crosshairs of a powerful hunter.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-01-30T12:58:00+00:00", "description": "All my DNFs this month - fewer than in December!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/january-dnfs\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "Crowbones (The World of the Others, #3; The Others, #8)", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Anne Bishop", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "0593337336" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

This one is definitely, completely on me – and one of the reasons I wish Netgalley had a ‘cancel request’ button! I love Bishop’s Black Jewels series (although I’m happy to dissect its flaws for hours) and I also really adore the Others series. But Lake Silence – the first in this spin-off series, and the first time we were introduced to Vicki and the Jumble and all the rest – was without question the book I enjoyed least of Bishop’s entire bibliography. I would even go so far as to say I actively hated it.

Which is a long-winded way of saying I was an idiot for requesting another book that featured Vicki, and the Jumble, and all the rest of it. But I was hoping it was just a one-off, and maybe I’d enjoy this one.

Reader, I did not.

Again, I wouldn’t call it a bad book. I know tons of people – including one of my best friends – loved Lake Silence and are really excited to get to see Vicki again. This is, once again, a case of me and the book just not vibing. And I should have known better, trusted my instincts and skipped over it.

If you enjoyed Lake Silence, you’re pretty much guaranteed to enjoy Crowbones too. If you didn’t enjoy Lake Silence, well – be smarter than I was and give this one a pass!

A River Enchanted (Elements of Cadence, #1) by Rebecca Ross
Published on: 15th February 2022
Genres: Fantasy
ISBN: 0063055988
Goodreads

House of Earth and Blood meets The Witch's Heart in Rebecca Ross’s brilliant first adult fantasy, set on the magical isle of Cadence where two childhood enemies must team up to discover why girls are going missing from their clan.

Jack Tamerlaine hasn’t stepped foot on Cadence in ten long years, content to study music at the mainland university. But when young girls start disappearing from the isle, Jack is summoned home to help find them. Enchantments run deep on Cadence: gossip is carried by the wind, plaid shawls can be as strong as armor, and the smallest cut of a knife can instill fathomless fear. The capricious spirits that rule the isle by fire, water, earth, and wind find mirth in the lives of the humans who call the land home. Adaira, heiress of the east and Jack’s childhood enemy, knows the spirits only answer to a bard’s music, and she hopes Jack can draw them forth by song, enticing them to return the missing girls.

As Jack and Adaira reluctantly work together, they find they make better allies than rivals as their partnership turns into something more. But with each passing song, it becomes apparent the trouble with the spirits is far more sinister than they first expected, and an older, darker secret about Cadence lurks beneath the surface, threatening to undo them all.

With unforgettable characters, a fast-paced plot, and compelling world building, A River Enchanted is a stirring story of duty, love, and the power of true partnership, and marks Rebecca Ross’s brilliant entry on the adult fantasy stage.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-01-30T12:58:00+00:00", "description": "All my DNFs this month - fewer than in December!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/january-dnfs\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "A River Enchanted (Elements of Cadence, #1)", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Rebecca Ross", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "0063055988" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

I freaking clawed my way through this one, okay? I wanted to love it so badly that I broke all my usual rules for it: I didn’t cut it off at 20%, the way I should have done – I made it all the way to 66%. Two-thirds of the book.

But I can’t keep making excuses when, at 66%, I still don’t care about how the book is going to end. Not because I could predict the ending – I absolutely can’t, I have a few theories but this is not a case of a book telegraphing the ending so loudly and obviously that it’s just not fun anymore.

Nope.

I just. Didn’t. Care.

Ross has created a lovely little island here, with enchanted plaids and spirits in the water, earth, and air. The various magics manage to feel both magical and homey; not mundane, not boring, but sort of quietly normalised into the setting.

The prose jerks back and forth between poetic and blunt, in a way that just did not work for me: every time I started to be hypnotised by the rhythym of the writing, I was slapped out of it – usually by dialogue, where everyone is constantly using the name of the person they’re talking to, even though real people don’t talk like that. There is a surprising amount of clumsy into-dumping, Ross telling us things about the characters rather than showing them through the actions of said characters. And the characters in question didn’t impress me; Sidra, the healer with a non-traditional marriage, is definitely the most interesting, but her parts had a weird childish aspect to then that I didn’t understand at all. I didn’t buy into the romance plotline, nor the ancestral enemy who we never actually see do anything but make a bid for peace – another plotline I didn’t care about, since there was no tension or build-up, no reason for me to not like or distrust the Enemy. If you want me to hate them, and thus have some kind of feelings about an alliance, you kind of need to give me a reason. Just telling me they’re bad ain’t gonna cut it. Show me!

And the writing, even when it is pretty, is not pretty enough to distract from the fact that in the first two thirds of the book, almost nothing happens. There are brief spikes of action separated by long plateaus of rambling introspection. Which I can definitely enjoy when you’ve got really gorgeous, decadent prose for me, but without that?

Nope.

I suspect a lot of people are going to love this, but for me, it doesn’t quite achieve what it’s trying to, and the effect is reminiscent of the Uncanny Valley; the closer you get without managing it, the worse the sense of Nope!!!

Azura Ghost (The Graven, #2) by Essa Hansen
Published on: 1st February 2022
Genres: Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
ISBN: 0356515591
Goodreads

Following Nophek Gloss comes the second book in this highly imaginative new space opera trilogy by debut author Essa Hansen - an action-packed adventure perfect for fans of Star Wars, Children of Time and A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.

Caiden has been on the run for ten years with his unique starship in order to keep his adversary, Threi, imprisoned. But when an old friend he'd once thought dead reappears, he is lured into a game of cat and mouse with the one person whose powers rival Threi's: Threi's sister Abriss.

Now with both siblings on the hunt for Caiden and his ship, Caiden must rescue his long-lost friend from their clutches and uncover the source of both his ship's power and his own origins in order to stop Abriss's plan to collapse the multiverse.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-01-30T12:58:00+00:00", "description": "All my DNFs this month - fewer than in December!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/january-dnfs\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "Azura Ghost (The Graven, #2)", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Essa Hansen", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "0356515591" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }}

A confession: when I reread Nophek Gloss, book one in this trilogy, so I would be all refreshed and ready for Azura Ghost…I skipped the last 40%. At my husband’s suggestion, because I’d been struggling with it for weeks.

I didn’t mention that when I reviewed it earlier this month, because I thought it was just a reread thing – that’s the darkest chunk of the book, and I already knew how it all went down, I just didn’t want to read it again. Right???

Except that I started feeling frustrated with Azura Ghost just a few pages in, and now I’m wondering if it wasn’t a reread problem, but a problem with these books.

Look: it’s heavily implied that Laythan’s crew – the group who discover, rescue, and adopt Caiden in Gloss – have been together for a long time. I went back through the book, highlighting passages as evidence, and I’ll admit they never specifically say how many years it’s been, but they call each other family; joke about the fact that Lathan doesn’t do rehoming of strays, only adopts them; talk about in which order they joined the group as if it all happened a good while back.

And yet one of the first things Ghost tells us – tells us, not shows us – is that the band has broken up.

Laythan’s crew hadn’t stayed together. Caiden had been their temporary glue, as children often were.

Hold on one gods’ damn second: all in all, Lathan’s crew spent maybe a WEEK with Caiden, total! They picked him up from his homeworld and took him to Unity! And that was it, apart from [spoilers]! Now you’re telling me he was all that was holding them together?!

Then there’s stuff like this

“Threi said he had a secret the Dynast must never know about, and the Dynast are obsessed with Graven things. My origin has to be that same thing

How in the multiverse do you figure that one, kiddo??? You have Point A, Point B, and then you jumped right to the end of the alphabet without explanation or evidence. What???

I still love Hansen’s imagination when it comes to alien flora and fauna, and I love her insistence on making sci fi beautiful, but I just Cannot. The internal logic doesn’t hold together, there’s too much telling and way too much handwaving. It rapidly got to the point where I dreaded having to open it up and continue reading, and I don’t stick with books that make reading feel like a chore. No thank you!

This was super disappointing, since this was one of my most-anticipated books of the year. Sigh.

Hopefully there’ll be even fewer DNFs last month!

The post January DNFs appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Defenestrate This Book: SongBroken by Heather Osborne

Songbroken by Heather Osborne
Published on: 7th March 2022
Published by Forest Path Books Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
ISBN: 9781951293468
Goodreads

She sang a vow to learn to heal, but the person she needed to save was herself.

Nils is a healer’s apprentice faced with a difficult choice. Only men are allowed to be healers. But if Nils denies her heart and chooses that path, neither a healer’s status nor the balm of study will make up for losing a chance at marriage with the person she loves.

Instead, of concealing her true self from everyone she knows, Nils risks a dangerous journey to the distant city, desperate to find a balance between life’s passion and heart’s life. But always, the question remains—can a healer’s songs truly work for a woman? And should Nils’s deception be discovered, she will be songbroken: shunned by her family, dismissed by her master, and denied any contract, vow, or relationship.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-01-29T10:07:23+00:00", "description": "Fuck this book. \n\nSeriously, fuck this book.", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/defenestrate-this-book-songbroken-by-heather-osborne\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "Songbroken", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Heather Osborne", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "9781951293468" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": 0.5, "bestRating": "5" }}

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

Sometimes a book is a betrayal.

This is one of those times.

SongBroken is set in a world where people choose and declare their gender at 18; a world which makes no connection whatsoever between biological sex and gender, but has very defined, very strict gender roles. The colours you’ve allowed to wear, the trade you’re permitted to learn, how you tie your shoelaces – all these things, and plenty more, are determined by your gender.

The story, if you want to call it that, follows two individuals – Nils and Kell – who don’t fit in their culture’s gender binary. The entire plot is their suffering, their struggles, how they are again and again rejected and declared outcasts. They travel from their isolated mountain town to the big city, but things are even worse there; although they do eventually find their way into a sort of underground community of gender-nonconforming and nonbinary people, the character who wants to be a healer will never be able to complete her training or practise openly – and most people believe healing efforts from someone like her are actively poisonous and dangerous, and thus won’t accept her help even when in dire straits. The other character, despite a passion and genuine skill for trading, will never be able to be a real merchant, taken on as an apprentice trader, or buy or sell or even haggle over purchases openly.

But it’s all fine, because in the end, Nils and Kel get together and presumably live happily ever after in their apartment over a brothel! A sweet and lovely brothel where fetishists come to have sex with all the cool nonbinary sex workers and everyone is friends forever! Isn’t it just the most perfect fairytale ending?

Never mind that Nils and Kel will be poor and struggling forever. Never mind that neither of them can do the work they love out in the open. Never mind that neither of them can ever go home again. Never mind that maybe it’s a bit dodgy to make the nonbinary safehaven a brothel, when so many trans and nonbinary people are forced into sex work out in the real world. Don’t think about any of that.

Reader, I can’t not think about it. And I’m not sure I’m ever going to forget the feeling of betrayal – of being absolutely gutted – that this is the kind of happy ending Osborne thinks people like me should get. Should be happy with. In a fantasy world, where there are literally no rules except the ones the author makes, this is the best that people like me can have?

I’m not sure I’m ever going to stop feeling the rage of seeing these kind of scraps thrown to people like me, and called a happy ending.

How dare you.

I loved this book, is the thing, right up until that ending stabbed me. Even while it catalogued all the ways in which Nils and Kell were struggling and suffering, I was impressed with the worldbuilding, and enjoyed the prose, and cared so much about these characters. And I was naive enough to assume that it was going to get better for them; really better, actually good, because what kind of story would it be otherwise? Why would you write a book about nonbinary suffering that didn’t get better? That’s not entertainment.

Unless you think it is.

Do you think the suffering of people like me is a good story? Would you read that for fun? Would you think all was well, the deviants got the best possible ending they could, if the story you read left them in poverty and ostracized and outright despised by the society they lived in? With no light at the end of the tunnel, no promise that change is coming, no hope that it will ever get better?

This is as good as it gets for people like me.

I would bet my next paycheck that Osborne never meant to imply or suggest any of this. SongBroken isn’t that kind of vicious. But honestly, that kind of makes it worse. Because this is genuinely the happiest ending she could imagine for these characters. Because she genuinely thought this was a happy ending, at all. And all the agents and editors and everyone else all the way down the line agreed.

I cried my eyes out, the evening I finished reading this. I was supposed to be hosting the cover reveal for SongBroken, and I emailed in to say no, I’m not boosting this book. I’m not supporting it. This isn’t a sweet, low-stakes fantasy novel exploring gender beyond the binary; it’s a treatise on nonbinary pain that says people like me should be grateful for and happy with the meanest, barest scraps – and claims those scraps are a feast.

Can you imagine how much that hurts? Especially when it’s coming, not from a screeching bigot you’re braced against, but from a book you let in, a book you almost loved?

I don’t need everyone who wants to write queer characters to be queer themselves. I don’t give a damn about that. But there’s a huge difference between writing a story with a character who happens to be queer…and writing a story that is about queerness. Coming out; dysphoria; transitioning; dealing with discrimination; these are just a few of the things that, if you choose to write about them, require doing your homework, and hiring sensitivity readers, and honestly, thinking long and hard about why you want to write this at all. I’m not saying you can’t write about it, I don’t think that’s how it works, but you need to know what you’re writing. If you write a story all about queer suffering and frame it as a pastel-coloured fairytale, not only are you a jerk, you’re also a bad writer, because you’ve fundamentally misunderstood your own damn story.

There are other aspects of SongBroken that raise the ‘bad writer’ warning flag; for example, Nils, the healer, starts experimenting with mixing or changing the healing remedies they’re taught early in the book, with an instinct for how they might be improved from the Way They’ve Always Been. It’s framed as innovative and correct, with the older healer who insists this is the Way They’ve Always Been presented as rigid and inflexible. But the book doesn’t go anywhere with this; it’s a plotline that fizzles out and is never fully developed, which is confusing and frustrating after it’s been set up as a Big Important Thing.

If I take a step back from my feelings, I would say that it reads like an early draft, not a finished book. The prose is lovely, but the structure and plots need work, and SongBroken needs more self-awareness; is this supposed to be escapist low-stakes fantasy? A ‘hey, transphobia is bad!’-moral story? Because right now, the tone is completely at odds with the subject matter, like the book can’t decide what it’s supposed to be or what it wants to say or do.

And, you know. There’s the whole thing of it being hugely, enormously hurtful. If that wasn’t deliberate – which I still don’t think it was – you desperately need to take this book back and rewrite it.

I am not grateful. I am not happy with these scraps. Do better, or don’t do it at all.

The post Defenestrate This Book: SongBroken by Heather Osborne appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Cover Reveal & A Tarot Reading: The Hourglass Throne by K.D. Edwards!

It’s no secret that I’m a hardcore fanenby for K.D. Edwards’ Tarot Sequence series, and I am INCANDESCENT with delight to be a part of the cover reveal for book three – the last book of the first trilogy in the sequence – The Hourglass Throne!

BEHOLD!

The Hourglass Throne by K.D. Edwards
Representation: Gay MC, bi/pansexual love interest, M/M, asexual secondary character, nonbinary secondary character, queernorm world
Published on: 17th May 2022
Genres: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Goodreads

As Rune Saint John grapples with the challenges of assuming the Sun Throne, a powerful barrier appears around New Atlantis’s famed rejuvenation center. But who could have created such formidable magic . . . what do they want from the immortality clinic . . . and what remains of the dozens trapped inside?

Though Rune and his lifelong bodyguard Brand are tasked with investigating the mysterious barrier, Rune is also busy settling into his new life at court. Claiming his father’s throne has irrevocably thrown him into the precarious world of political deception, and he must secure relationships with newfound allies in time to keep his growing found family safe. His relationship with his lover, Addam Saint Nicholas, raises additional political complications they must navigate. But he and Brand soon discover that the power behind the barrier holds a much more insidious, far-reaching threat to his family, to his people, and to the world.

Now, the rulers of New Atlantis must confront an enemy both new and ancient as the flow of time itself is drawn into the conflict. And as Rune finds himself inexorably drawn back to the fall of his father’s court and his own torture at the hands of masked conspirators, the secrets that he has long guarded will be dragged into the light—changing the Sun Throne, and New Atlantis, forever.

The climax of the first trilogy in the nine-book Tarot Sequence, The Hourglass Throne delivers epic urban fantasy that blends humor, fast-paced action, and political intrigue.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2022-01-28T17:00:00+00:00", "description": "The most beautiful cover I have ever seen; a thesis on its symbolism; and a tarot reading!", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/cover-reveal-a-tarot-reading-the-hourglass-throne-by-k-d-edwards\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "The Hourglass Throne", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "K.D. Edwards", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": false, "bestRating": "5" }} Preorder The Hourglass Throne now!

Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Chapters Indigo

Micah Epstein has DONE IT AGAIN! Good gods, just look at it! I’ve been staring at it for days and I’m still not tired of it!

It makes my eyes happy. It makes my eyes SO HAPPY!

So freaking happy that I ended up writing a mini-thesis for you on all the amazing symbolism in this masterpiece (or at least, all the symbolism I could find! Feel free to share your own thoughts and theories in the comments!), then using all three covers in this trilogy as cards for a tarot reading. I HOPE YOU ENJOY BOTH!

But hey, if you don’t??? Just scroll back up and feast your eyes on the beautiful cover again 8DDD

SYMBOLISM

:I have not talked about this with Micah Epstein or KD Edwards; any and all thoughts and speculation are purely my own!:

The lore of the Tarot Sequence states that the tarot deck humans use for divination was inspired by the Arcanum.

So I’m going to read this cover like it’s a tarot card.

Because it kind of is, isn’t it? Each book of the first trilogy is named after a tarot card – the Sun, the Hanged Man, the Hourglass (which isn’t a card in human decks, but only because humans didn’t know about it. If they had, it would be. Which makes it an honorary tarot card, a tarot card that could have been, would have been) – so let’s look at it like a tarot spread. A reading.

(Pun unintended, but very much embraced.)

So what does this cover – this card – tell us?

The hourglass here stands for more than a literal representation of the (fallen and dismantled) Hourglass Throne. It also serves as a countdown, a reminder that capital-t Things are coming to a head (or an end). This trilogy has been building and building to a climax, and this is it. Here it comes. The sand is almost all at the bottom of the hourglass. Time is running out.

(But whose? Rune’s? The reader’s? New Atlantis’? Or is the clock chiming for the nameless, faceless Someones who destroyed the Sun Court? Are they finally to be dragged into the open?

No way to tell.)

But the hourglass, despite its size, its brilliance and grandeur – despite all that, it does not dominate the image. It is squarely the background of this card, not its focus. Instead, every element bends towards Rune; the wings of angels frame him, shield him, curve around him in what could be protectiveness or devotion or both.

(Note the two angels that are pressed against the lower half of the hourglass, as if to brace against it or contain it; they stand between the glass and Rune, shielding him. Could they represent specific individuals, or are they metaphors for the stronger position Rune has now, the influence and power and allies that will help shield him in the case of any new disaster?)

The curve of wings around Lord Sun brings to mind the idea of planetary orbits around the literal sun; the same circling, the same sense of great and beautiful things revolving around the great, bright thing whose gravity has drawn them, that has become their heart.

And a solar system is what Rune has built – or gathered, or found gathering around him – over the course of these books. Max; Ciaran; Addam; Quinn; Corinne; Anna; Corbie; Layne; Lady Death; all of them are a part of his circle now. Even his relationship with Lord Tower, who stood as Rune’s patron/mentor in The Last Sun, has deepened; now Lord Tower comes to barbecues and plays babysitter for Rune’s kids, invitations he probably wouldn’t have accepted at the start of the series if Rune had dared to make them.

So although Rune is alone in this card, the imagery evokes his family and allies, a reminder and a promise that he is not alone at all.

But let’s focus on Rune himself now.

It’s significant that, no matter how imposing and gilded it is, Rune has his back to the hourglass. If there is a countdown, he’s ignoring it; his expression says that he’s focussed inward, thinking about something important – something more important than the great gaudy thing behind him. Whatever great power is trying to impose a time limit on him, it’s one whose authority he does not recognise. He will not be rushed, or forced, or play to anyone else’s script. The hourglass can run as it pleases; it can’t make him run. He has turned his back on it; he is not afraid of it.

(This might also symbolise his turning his back on tradition; perhaps more than any other Court, the Hourglass Throne elicits the aura of Old Atlantis. Every other Arcana has had to adapt at least somewhat to the modern world, but the Hourglass Throne ceased to exist long before the creation of New Atlantis. Symbolically, it embodies Old Atlantis, and Old Atlantean ways of thinking. So for Rune to turn his back to an hourglass may mean also turning his back on what it stands for.

Rune has always been an unconventional Scion, viewing his power as a responsibility and not a right; he cares about civilian casualties that don’t even register to other Arcana, considers it a Scion’s duty to stand between danger and those who can’t defend themselves, and takes under his aegis anyone who seeks shelter there, regardless of whether or not he gains by it. I think it’s fair to say that he isn’t interested in this is how it’s always been. Which was significant when he was just a Scion, but has the potential to make enormous waves now that he’s a sitting Arcana.)

(And if the hourglass, in any part, represents the Atlantean old school? Look closely. There are cracks in the glass. Perhaps the old ways of doing things are already fracturing under the pressure.)

Rune appears older and more weathered in this image than he did on the previous two ‘cards’; he’s been through a lot, and it shows, but he’s still here. It’s also significant that, although Rune has been shown wearing his ring-sigils in every ‘card’ so far, this is the first time we’ve seen his two most emotionally meaningful sigils; his ankh, one of his very first sigils (and probably the first of the ones he currently claims) and the platinum disc given to him by Quinn. His past and his present (and arguably his future, since the disc was a gift from a prophet); a sigil from his first family (the seneschal of the old Sun Court) alongside a sigil from his newfound, newmade family. His strength comes from caring, and the people he cares about, and who care about him. That’s been clear from day one, but now we see it manifest.

This is the first card in which Rune is not making a threat display; in the Sun card, his Aspect is rising, and in the Hanged Man card, his sabre is in its weapon form, still glowing with heat. Here, he is seated. Contemplative. He has his sigils, but isn’t in the process of using them, and there’s no sign of his Aspect or sabre. He is ready to fight if necessary – again, he has his sigils – but he looks like a man who’s been through the wars, and isn’t looking for another one. He’s never been hot-headed, has never gone looking for fights or failed to acknowledge (and been at ease with) when he’s not the scariest person in the room…but perhaps he’s warier of conflict than he ever has been before. He has more to protect now, and more to lose. More people he loves who can’t protect themselves the way Brand can (the only other person to have appeared on one of Rune’s cards, so far).

Perhaps we could say that he is ready to defend, but not looking to attack.

Another thought, which does not necessarily contradict the previous one; Rune may not be making a threat display…because he no longer needs to. The purpose of a threat display is to warn a potential opponent that attacking would be a bad idea – but that is only necessary when your opponent doesn’t already know that. Rune Sun is now Lord Sun, the Sun of Atlantis. Those who weren’t smart enough to realise how dangerous he was in The Last Sun have no excuse not to know better now. There is no more need for warnings, for threats; Rune is the threat.

“I am not in danger; I am the danger.”

Breaking Bad

He is thinking hard. Ignoring the hourglass behind him, he lets sand of his own fall through his fingers. Time lost? Or time spent, well-spent, in building him the life he has now? Perhaps it’s a rejection of what the hourglass represents; what others have gathered and contained within the gilded edifice of the hourglass, Rune lets slip away. The sand could be time, or Atlantean tradition or custom, or even, given its colour and the light it seems to emit, gold dust or magical power given physical form. It could be all or none of these; whichever it is, it’s something Rune either doesn’t value, or doesn’t value as much as what it might cost him. Time, tradition, riches, power – they all matter. That might be why he looks pensive – they matter, and he has been without them all, and knows what they’re worth; it must hurt to deliberately let them go. But they don’t matter as much as love, family, doing what’s right.

The sand glows. Rune sits in shadow, letting the light in his hand fall away.

He doesn’t need it. He has his own. When push comes to shove and his Aspect rises, he is, literally, his own light.

Both releasing the sand and his lack of a threat-display speak of an inner confidence, a certainty and self-assuredness. He knows who and what he is, what his values are, who his family and allies are, what he needs and what he is capable of. That was true in earlier cards too – he’s always known who and what he is, what he can and can’t do. But he’s more than he was in The Last Sun. He can do more than he could in The Hanged Man. He’s grown, and he knows it.

(But does he know the glass is cracking? If it doesn’t represent Atlantean tradition – or even if it does – does he know that it’s close to breaking, and unleashing what’s inside? He’s directly in the path of anything that breaks free and surges out. If he doesn’t know – if he doesn’t see, or isn’t watching – it might fall on him. It might sweep him away.)

Angels are both guardians and warriors, and that’s how Rune has defined himself from the first. Here, angelic statues gather around him; two of them are even looking down, as if watching over him – but also as if they’re waiting to see what he will do.

(Could they, too, represent actual individuals? Who could they be, protecting and watching?)

They know, like we know, that whatever it is? It’s going to be mythic.

And on a lighter note…

The angels gathered around Rune delight me not just because they’re beautiful, but because they make manifest a line in one of my favourite songs, a song that’s made me think of Rune and his story from the very first time I heard it;

Angels sing their songs
They call me out by name

Angels fall, their songs are all that’s left to sing
Faces on the walls are watching over me

Tarot Reading

A three-card spread: the Sun, the Hanged Man, and the Hourglass. Moving from the bright light of the Sun, through to the shadows of the Hourglass. And yet, there is still light. The painful position of being strung upside-down in the Hanged Man was escaped, and there are angels gathered ’round. This is not a descent into darkness, but a distillation, becoming more potent and more true as we move from left to right. A spreading of wings.

The Sun

The Sun is a card of light and joy; the light at the end of the tunnel, and the inner strength we all have inside. In a reading, the Sun is often a reminder of that inner fire, and a call to connect to it and embrace it. This matches the themes of The Last Sun perfectly, because the events of that book are Rune’s wake-up call; the relatively quiet, normal-ish life he’s created for himself was all well and good, but now it’s time to get his destiny back on track. It’s time to remember – and reclaim – who he is; his bloodline, his heritage, his power. To quote Biddy Tarot, the clearest go-to site when it comes to card meanings;

You have what others want and are being asked to radiate your energy and your gifts out into the world in a big way. Tap into your power and use your Divine will to express that power in positive ways.

I think everyone who’s read it can agree that Rune more than does that in The Last Sun.

The Hanged Man

The Hanged Man of the tarot stands for surrender to truth, change, and fate; it represents a time of change – changes that cannot be denied – and an instruction to let go of the things that have been holding you back. It’s time to shift perspective and shift gears; your old way of life is ending, and it’s time to let it go. It’s time to start – or get back to – your life’s purpose.

I’d say that’s pretty spot-on for Rune’s story in The Hanged Man, wouldn’t you?

The Hourglass

I have no guidebook that contains an entry on the Hourglass as a card; even Biddy Tarot lets me down. But I’m an intuitive tarot reader, and I’ve spent days analysing the symbolism of this card, so here goes nothing.

The Hourglass represents external change from an unexpected direction; a time when the inner strength developed and honed in the previous cards is put to the test. Pressure that has been building is now released, and the fallout may be devastating. In deciding what you can and cannot, will and will not do or allow, you must draw the line and hold it. But you will not be alone when you do so. All the resources you have gathered – physical and fiscal, mental and emotional, romantic and platonic and familial – over the course of your journey are with you.

What you have gone through has not broken you; it has distilled you. You are more yourself than you have ever been. You are great enough to face this and win.

You have been through the crucible, and you are still burning. For what crucible can snuff out a Sun?

Ultimately, remember this: once an hourglass runs out, you flip it over. It starts again. This is an end, but it is not the end.

Not even close.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WEBSITE
TWITTER
GOODREADS

K.D. lives and writes in North Carolina but has spent time in Massachusetts, Maine, Colorado, New Hampshire, Montana, and Washington. (Common theme until NC: Snow. So, so much snow)

Mercifully short careers in food service, interactive television, corporate banking, retail management, and bariatric furniture has led to a much less short career in Higher Education.

The first book in his urban fantasy series The Tarot Sequence, called The Last Sun, was published by Pyr in June 2018. The third installment, The Hourglass Throne, is expected May 17 2022.

The post Cover Reveal & A Tarot Reading: The Hourglass Throne by K.D. Edwards! appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.