In Short: June

Not a bad month at all, but I was definitely more scatter-brained than usual – I started more and more books instead of finishing the ones I was already reading. The hubby was on vacation for two weeks, which was LOVELY; we went hunting for rocks, for the walls he’s been building in the garden! (They’re beautiful.) We didn’t catch up on any of our tv shows though, despite swearing we were totally going to do that. (We are so bad at watching tv that it’s a little bit embarrassing.)

ARCs Received

MANY EXTREMELY EXCITING BOOKS! The Isle in the Silver Sea and To Ride a Rising Storm hopefully need no introduction; if you’re not already starry-eyed, go look them up and then you will be! Pantomime has had an interesting publication history: it was originally published as a YA novel, but has now been massively rewritten and is being released as an Adult book, which is very cool! Savage Bloom is a gamble on my part; I’ve loved one of ST Gibsons’ books, enjoyed a few others, and DNFed one, so I have no clue if I’ll mesh with this one or not, but let’s hope so! What a Fish Looks Like looks absolutely enchanting; click the title to see the publisher page with the synopsis, and tell me it’s not immediately going on your tbr! He’s So Possessed With Me is YA, but was immediately addictive from the first page, and Cry, Voidbringer (the Solaris edition, not Bindery) looks extremely promising!

Those were all via Netgalley, but Nine-Tenths, which I am 2/3s of the way through and loving immensely, was sent to me by the author; Goldheart I received through BookSirens. The Dreaming Man and The Dead Withheld were sent to me from Neon Hemlock, who consistently publish very cool queer stuff and I am HYPED; and last but certainly not least, the author of Daughters of Flood and Fury sent me an arc as part of the book tour, which I enjoyed a lot!

Daughters of Flood and Fury is the sequel to one of my Best of 2024 reads, Saints of Storm and Sorrow (review here), an anti-colonialist Filipino fantasy that is VERY QUEER with WONDERFUL WEATHER MAGIC! I’m already obsessed.

Read

13 books read this month – quite a drop from 25 in May! Like I said: extra-scatterbrained!Sia this month!

But on the flip side, most of these were freaking INCREDIBLE reads: Architects of Memory and Fire Logic were phenomenal, and I should have read them years ago! Notes From a Regicide is so hard to describe, but I am so, so in love with it; Ocean’s Godori delighted me from start to finish; and Kit Whitfield’s books about fairy smiths–!!!

Seriously, PLEASE go read In the Heart of Hidden Things, and then All the Hollow of the Sky! They’re just!!! SO INCREDIBLY EXCELLENT!

It belatedly occurred to me that I have a Bluesky thread where I jot down a couple of sentences on every book I read (though it’s sometimes weeks between updates, and then I post a bunch at once) and there’s a chance some of you might be interested? So the start of the thread is here, and this is where the June reads start!

Reviewed

I have several more reviews in the works, but I only finished two mini-ones and the epically long essay on The Mercy Makers this month. All in all, I’m okay with that.

DNFed

Quite a few of these were objectively good, but not for me. Several were straight-up-stupid! I wrote about them in my DNF post yesterday.

ARCs Outstanding

This is totally a manageable number of arcs. For sure. No let’s not add this month’s arcs in, why would you do that???

Unmissable SFF Updates

No additions to this year’s Unmissable list this month, so we remain at 81 books! (Though I do have a handful of reads that I strongly suspect will go on the Unmissable list once I finish them…)

But I started putting together next year’s Unmissables, which is very exciting!!! There’s only 11 books on it at the moment, but I’m sure it’ll be much longer before next January!

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

two were five-star reads (The Witch Roads and The Mercy Makers)three were DNFs (Six Wild Crowns, Dance of Lies, Meet Me at the Crossroads)two I haven’t finished yet, but am enjoying very much (Starstruck and Seventhblade)

If both the ones I haven’t finished yet turn out to be wonderful, then I’ll do a bit better than breaking even…which I think is not a very successful month for my predictions! I guess we’ll see?

Misc

I reviewed The Mercy Makers twice; once here on my blog, and once for Ancillary Review. I’m not very happy with the latter, I think it’s way too reductive about the book, but Ancillary has strict wordcount rules so what can you do???

I spent a lot of this month working on my ‘Every month is Pride’ post, where I list queer Adult sff coming out post-June. I’ve done this for a couple years now, but this is the longest one yet! It’ll go live tomorrow.

Along with my Mid-Year Freakout Tag! That’s been fun, even if the stats have made me blanch a few times…

Looking Forward

So many wonderful new releases to look forward to on the next page of the calendar! A Covenant of Ice and Daughters of Flood and Fury are sequels to books I loved, wrapping up their respective series; as far as I know Moonrising and A Resistance of Witches are standalones, about building a commune on the moon and witches going against Hitler, respectively; The Memory Hunters kicks off a new series about a post-apocalyptic world in which some people can use mushrooms to access memories of the past; and Stone & Sky is the latest Rivers of London novel! Which gives me a lovely excuse to reread the series…

Wishing us all a jubilant July!

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