In Short: April

The first half of April kinda got eaten by the worst fibro flare I’ve had in years – but to make up for it, I’ve had some amazingly good days in the last couple weeks, so. I’ll take it?

ARCs Received

Four of these were from publishers I’m auto-approved for, so they didn’t involve placing requests, but that does not make them less exciting! (All the first four.) Most of this month’s authors are new to me – I’ve read Mia Tsai and Hiron Ennes’ debuts, and the first two books in Karin Lowachee’s Crowns of Ishia trilogy, but the rest are gambles. Fingers crossed all eight are awesome!

Read

20 books read this month! Exactly the same as in March, which is kind of interesting in that I can’t remember the last time I had two months with the same number of books read.

The Iron Below Remembers is an incredible alt-history packed full of brilliant footnotes, superhero drama, and archaeology mysteries. *chef’s kiss* A King’s Trust proved romantasy can be fantastic (I was starting to wonder), and Little Wolf and the Witch was low on magic but high on Adult Characters With Functioning Braincells. Much appreciated! And as is obvious (if you can make out the book covers, anyway) Cherryh’s Foreigner series took over most of the rest of my reading a little bit! I regret nothing.

So You Want To Be A Robot was technically a reread, but it’s a new edition with an additional story; regardless, I absolutely adored it, again. Same with Saint Death’s Herald; I might actually have enjoyed it more this second time around. I definitely appreciated The Black Tides of Heaven more than when I last read it years ago – think I should reread the whole Tensorate series.

Reviewed

My fibro flare messed up my review-writing big time, but I’m pretty happy with how the Herald review came out, at least. (The reviews for When the Tide Held the Moon and Brighter Than Scale will go live next month.)

DNFed

Library at Hellebore is excellent, and Disco Witches of Fire Island might be great! It’s just that I’m too much of a wimp for Hellebore, and I’m not the right reader for Disco Witches.

The others mostly sucked.

ARCs Outstanding

Being badly sick for a chunk of weeks hasn’t helped; I’ve definitely fallen behind in my reading schedule, and I suspect going forward there’s going to be more reviews that appear after a book’s release date, instead of before. I dislike this extremely, but c’est la vie.

Unmissable SFF Updates

Alas, I had to remove several books from the list whose releases have been pushed back to next year. So it goes! I’m sure they’ll be great when we get them. And of course, there were a couple of new covers revealed. But that brings us to a total of 81 Unmissables!

How did my predictions/anticipated reads for April go? I declared ten books Unmissable for this month, and–

two were five-star reads (The Raven Scholar and Saint Death’s Herald)one was a four-star read (Drop of Corruption)one was a three-and-a-half star read (When the Tides Held the Moon)six I haven’t finished yet (Unsex Me Here, Somadina, Eat the Ones You Love, and Awakened)two I haven’t started yet (Faithbreaker and Don’t Sleep With the Dead)

Of the ones I read, a great mix! But wow, that’s a lot of Unmissables to not finish, or not even GET to in release month. That’s not happened before since I started tracking them…huh.

Misc

A lot of my blogging time this month went towards preparing for Wyrd & Wonder next month (tomorrow!) And even more went into…something that I should be posting tomorrow, hopefully! It’s been a lot of fun – even if I’ve also been obsessing over both the W&W stuff and the surprise-thing way too much.

Looking Forward

May is the most crowded month on my book-releases calendar so far – there’s three or four books I’m interested in EVERY WEEK! But these eight are at the top of my must-haves: Starving Saints, which sounds deeply, excitingly weird; Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil – also weird, but in a much more light-hearted way; cosy ocean scifi Letter From the Lonesome Shore; Amplitudes, a queer SFF collection from my favourite indie; Overgrowth, about a baby alien no one believes is an alien until the invasion arrives; and Sun Blessed Prince, which I’m hoping justifies its comps to Song of Achilles. Plus, two very different takes on magic schools – Incandescent, Emily Debut’s sophomore novel about a magic school deputy-headmistress; and Grimore Grammar School Parent Teacher Association, which is from the perspective of a parent who’s kid has to suddenly go to magic school.

Wishing us all a magnificent May!

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