The Bookish Mutant

Book Review Tuesday (6/9/26) – Queen of Faces

Posted on June 9, 2026 by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I’ve seen a lot of buzz about Queen of Faces in the past few months, and it seemed intriguing. Plus, you know I’m always up for queer rep in my fantasy! So of course, I had to pick Queen of Faces up. (Unrelated, but I’ve had “Queen of Eyes” by The Soft Boys stuck in my head solely because of reading this book. New title for the sequel just dropped?) I’m glad to say that though it wasn’t perfect, Queen of Faces was a promising debut fantasy novel!

Enjoy this week’s review!

Queen of Faces – Petra Lord

Anabelle Gage is trapped in a body that isn’t hers—cheap, male, and rapidly deteriorating. Her only way to swap into a new, magical body is to be accepted into Paragon Academy, the most prestigious school in all of the Eight Oceans. After failing her entrance exams, Anabelle is certain that she’s doomed to die in the body she’s trapped in. One run-in with the law later, and she’s faced with Nicholas Carriwitch, Paragon’s renowned headmaster, who gives her a choice: be his right-hand mercenary, or die for her transgressions. Now entangled in a world of magic, crime, and mystery, Anabelle must decide if her choice was worth it—and how to get out of the body that she hates.

TW/CW: descriptions of injury, blood, suicide, violence, racism (fictional ethnicities/nationalities), war themes, dysphoria

In this day and age, it truly makes my heart sing to see queer voices flourishing in YA and middle grade voices flourish. I just had this lingering feeling that this is going to make so many trans teens so, so happy. This novel is so thematically strong; Ana’s journey was full of twists and turns, but it was so easy to sympathize with her and her continual struggle to find herself—not just in a new chassis (the magical bodies that can be swapped in this universe), but in terms of her identity. Lord includes a lot of motifs about transformation; there’s a recurring bit about caterpillars, butterflies, and metamorphosis that was, granted, a bit heavy-handed at the worst of times, but for a YA audience, was a lovely and poignant metaphor for both transness and general coming-of-age. Her journey is a perfect one for a YA audience, trans or not—her feelings of insecurity and unsureness about her identity and purpose are sure to deeply resonate with so many people.

Queen of Faces is billed as dark academia, but I’m not sure if it completely fits the label. We get some of that classic magical school format paired with the dark underbelly that Ana discovers, but most of the plot focuses on Ana’s time as a mercenary, and not necessarily Paragon Academy itself. That being said, it’s not necessarily an issue with the book—more just an issue with the marketing. Paragon Academy started to feel like an afterthought towards the end, and there were definitely some loose ends that could’ve been tied up with that plot. However, Ana’s mercenary plot was what drove the novel, and it was the most compelling part of the story for me. Lord has a knack for writing action sequences, and her tense atmosphere was flawlessly maintained for the whole novel. I loved how Ana and Wes played off of each other during this plot, and all of the friends-turned-foes (and vice versa) had excellent chemistry; Ana and Wes are shaping up to be the kind of enemies-to-lovers YA couple that I would’ve loved in high school. (However, the weird pseudo-love triangle going on was, yes, pretty YA, but it was so rushed and unfinished that I couldn’t even excuse it being YA. It was just…odd.) Beyond that, I loved how all of this coalesced into Ana’s character development, and her discovery of the truth of her mysterious job—and her superiors—was such a vital component to her eventually self-realization.

The worldbuilding in Queen of Faces was a mixed bag, but most of it was solid. Lord’s magic system was imaginative and well thought-out. I loved Lord’s visualizations of the branches forming, and I loved all of the consequences of how magic affected Caimor and the rest of the world. I also think the history of Caimor and the Eight Oceans was explained nicely, and without any unwieldy info-dumps. The system of the chassises and body-swapping was well-done as well, and served as a cogent commentary on class inequality. However, some of the other aspects of the worldbuilding were slightly shaky. I had a vague sense of the technology level—I assumed closer to the 1920’s given the presence of cars and radios, but not much more advanced than that, but I didn’t get a good sense of it. Lord also regularly inserted the fact that Ana loves romance manga, which felt jarring and out of place in this otherwise fantastical setting. I had the same issue with the fact that there’s something called the “Babel Curse,” which would imply the existence of Christianity/the Bible in this otherwise completely fantasy universe. Small issues, sure, but they took me out of the narrative with how much they were mentioned. But for a debut novel’s stab at worldbuilding, it’s a good start.

Queen of Faces unfortunately suffered from some pacing issues. The first third or so was paced reasonably well, and I had a good sense for how the events of the novel had progressed. However, once Anabelle gets to Paragon Academy, there’s time-skipping all over the place; my irrational hatred for random timeskips is just that—irrational—but Lord often didn’t let the reader know that these timeskips had even happened until the last relevant minute. I fully thought that only days had passed by, and boom…it’s been a month? The pacing was just so uneven that it was difficult to get my footing in places, which took me out of the main narrative, especially in the first half of the novel. Given the fact that we’ve mostly left Paragon Academy behind by the second half of the novel, it didn’t help that the pacing also left so many loose threads unresolved. Things evened out towards the end, but it never fully recovered from the topsy-turvy pacing at the beginning.

All in all, a daring and mysterious debut full of dark magic, shifting alliances, and conspiracies. 3.75 stars!

Queen of Faces is Petra Lord’s debut novel and the first book in the Queen of Faces series; its followup, King of Masks, is slated for release in 2027.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 6/7/26

Posted on June 7, 2026 by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: happy pride from Damon Albarn, Queen Latifah, and Meg Duffy. Honorable mention to Brian Eno, whose outfits in the early ’70s slayed so hard that he deserves to be an honorary member of the LGBTQ+ community.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 6/7/26

“Battle” – Blur

In addition to healing my 12-year-old self, I have begun healing my 18-year-old self…by getting a painfully spendy copy of 13 from my local record store. These damn European imports!! Hey, I had a bit of extra money from graduation…I swear to god that vinyl had been speaking to me like the Green Goblin mask every time I went inside. It had to happen eventually.

Of course, I knew it was going to be worth every penny—13 is still in my top 10 albums of all time. This was the first time I’ve listened to it all the way through in years (I played it to death in my senior year of high school), and it’s one of those records that I wish I could erase my memory of and re-experience listening to it for the first time. I seriously can’t imagine how much of a shock to the system it must’ve been to Blur fans in 1999; Even after their self-titled album—a bitter plunge into grunge after their burnout from Britpop fame—13 was truly nothing like what they’d previously done. One of the reasons it sticks out so much to me is how uninhibited they all feel. The harmony of Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James, and Dave Rowntree continued to be as neat as a pin, but all four of them were bent on going into the most daring, experimental territory that the band had ever reached. By all accounts, all of them were…pretty miserable, unfortunately—a lot of 13 deals with the breakup between Albarn and his longtime girlfriend, Justine Frischmann, and tensions with Graham Coxon would lead him to leave the band a year later. Some of the stylistic deviations feel like middle fingers, like the jarring transition from the plaintive, heart-pouring “Tender” to the jagged howling of “Bugman.” You can’t tell me that wasn’t deliberate trolling on the band’s part. Yet even if it came from a burned out place, the experimental rebellion on this album left an undeniably positive mark on Blur’s legacy as a band.

“Battle” remains one of the more surprising tracks on the album. Clocking in at nearly eight minutes long, it’s the longest song on the album, but only by a single second—”Tender,” my favorite song from the album (and maybe of all time), is 7:41 long, while “Battle” squeezes past at 7:42. Like many of the unexpected twists and turns on the album, those tracks couldn’t be more different. The lyrics are pretty spare—the focus is on the sprawling, very sci-fi soundscape that unfolds over this song’s long runtime. What begins with a riff of dainty, spacey synth notes unfolds into an echoing, forming-and-reforming galaxy of sound. It really feels like you’ve been jettisoned into space at breakneck speed, watching the stars speed past. The deep rumble of Coxon’s guitar churns as Albarn’s voice, tweaked into oblivion with all manner of effects, seems to dissipate in real time. It seriously boggles my mind that this hasn’t been used in a big-budget sci-fi movie to soundtrack a tense dogfight in space. It’s eons away from the much more grounded, British social commentary that was their claim to fame in the mid-’90s, but that’s what makes it last to me. 13 was Blur breaking open the confines that the music industry had imposed on them, and “Battle” feels like all of that pent-up energy spiraling outwards into the potential that had always been incubating within them.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Ancestral Night – Elizabeth Bear – the perfect soundtrack for an adventure aboard a mysterious spaceship that encounters its fair share of borderline eldritch beings.

“Born Under a Bad Sign” – Richard Hawley

I might as well admit now that I’ve been leeching off my brother and his girlfriend, who have been going through the 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die list. That’s also how I got “Crosseyed and Painless” last month, although that was bound to happen eventually. Coles Corner, on the other hand, might’ve passed me by completely, even with my Britpop proclivities (he was a founding member of Longpigs and was a touring and session for Pulp for a time).

I only got a handful of songs from Coles Corner from my brother (he said some of them “got too Sinatra,” which makes perfect sense, honestly), but they’re all packages of British rock tracks that seem plucked from yesteryear. “The Ocean” was almost my pick this week, with its staggering, cinematic build, but I just keep returning to “Born Under a Bad Sign.” It’s a small wonder that this hasn’t been in a Wes Anderson movie, and not just because of their mutual connections with Jarvis Cocker—this seems like the exact kind of ’60s-inflected, slow ballad that would soundtrack Léa Seydoux wistfully smoking out the window, or something. The comfort that comes from “Born Under a Bad Sign” isn’t necessarily from the nostalgic air of it all. It just has this innate, warm texture, created by Hawley’s smooth vocals, that evokes being carefree and sprawled out in bed, fresh cups of rich coffee and day fading into night as you shut your eyes.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Cybernetic Tea Shop – Meredith Katz – “Now you’re laying in the afterglow/And there’s something that she wants to know/Are you going be the one to say/You belong to me…”

“U.N.I.T.Y.” – Queen Latifah

Look, I’m not saying that this generation doesn’t have its fair share of fantastic, feminist artists—rappers in particular—but I maintain that some of these gen alpha/gen z boys and men have gotten too bold…they need to have the fear of Queen Latifah telling them “WHO YOU CALLIN’ A BITCH?” put in them, is all I’m saying.

God. So good. It’s so easy to see why “U.N.I.T.Y.” has become such an enduring classic for a myriad of reasons—its significance in a very male-dominated hip hop scene, it’s genuinely feminist message (no hollow girlboss anthems here), and the fact that it’s just so smooth and catchy. And I think the reason that it resonates to this day is because it calls attention to all of the ways that misogyny has infected society. It reminds me in structure of Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” in that it presents its initial issue, and in subsequent verses declares: “oh, you thought I was done? Nope, sit back down, we’re deconstructing misogynoir from the top down.” From offhand catcalling to domestic violence, “U.N.I.T.Y.” pulls the curtain on just how deep misogyny runs in society.

And it also resonates because nothing that Queen Latifah talks about here has gone away. Just as it was in 1993, women—especially women of color—are subject to the worst of society’s misogynist tendencies. The domestic violence remains. The objectification, name-calling, and slurs remain. Neoliberal feminism would have you believe that since women (occasionally women of color) can become CEOs and whatnot that misogyny has been solved. One look at the world at large would tell you the exact opposite. A queer, Black woman publicly calling out this in the 1990’s was a vital wake-up call, and it remains so to this day, 33 years later, in an age of widespread misogyny. There hasn’t been a time since “U.N.I.T.Y.” was released where it hasn’t been relevant. Plus, it’s just catchy. I’m warming up to saxophone samples here. Every element of this song is incredible.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

She Who Knows – Nnedi Okorafor – a story of strength, resilience, and one girl’s journey across the desert.

“Spinning Away” – Brian Eno and John Cale

You thought you could let your guard down again? Boom, get Eno’d, fuckers.

Like 13, Wrong Way Up has also been speaking to me like the Green Goblin mask whenever I go to my local record store, but not necessarily for the same reason. It’s way more reasonably priced, but I don’t want to buy it until I’ve actually listened to the album, y’know? But it’s Eno! And John Cale! “Spinning Away” keeps pushing me towards listening to it, and it’s convinced me that maybe warm weather is the perfect time to listen to it. Despite Eno and Cale purportedly wanting to kill each other while recording this album, both songs I’ve heard from Wrong Way Up (the other being “Lay My Love”) are nothing short of harmonious and enchanting. “Spinning Away” is also mostly Eno at the wheel; like “Lay My Love,” it has a circular, cyclical kind of groove that feeds into itself. The song seems to describe the process of making art—here, it’s an artist painting the sky, and it even references perhaps the most iconic painting of the sky of all time, Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” The opening has to be some of Eno’s most evocative lyricism, and for him, that’s really saying something:

“Up on a hill/As the day dissolves/With my pencil turning moments into line/High above/In the violet sky/A silent silver plane/It draws a golden chain…”

How can you not picture such a vivid scene after hearing that? And every successive line creates such a vibrant image. I always picture those time-lapses of galaxies colliding once this song really kicks in. It’s so transportive. Describing stars as a “million-insect storm” might be one of my favorite ways space has been described in song. It’s an almost dreamlike narrative of both the painting and the landscape morphing (spinning away, even) as they scramble to capture the image. There’s an air of impermanence about “Spinning Away,” but the way Eno and Cale paint it feels nothing short of euphoric, with Eno’s wonderstruck vocals and Cale’s soaring strings. To me, it feels like a take on impermanence as a positive experience—it’s important to capture these fleeting moments in life, and it’s a privilege to see the world changing before you, even in the most minute sense.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Last Gifts of the Universe – Riley August – “One by one/All the stars appear/As the great winds of the planet spiral in/Spinning away/Like the night sky at Arles/In the million insect storm/The constellations form…”

“Aquamarine” – Hand Habits

I discovered this song unexpectedly after watching Fruit Bats’ episode of What’s In My Bag? recently. It immediately cemented itself into one of my hypothetical playlists that only exists in my mind…that being “songs that seem engineered in a lab to be featured in Netflix’s Heartstopper.” It’s that very specific, indie-pop, reverbed synth sound that makes that connection work for me. Those synths! “Aquamarine” skitters along with all manner of them, creating a controlled frenzy that darts all over the place. Brief guitar interludes make you feel jolted back to reality after waking up from a vivid dream before Duffy plunges you headfirst back into the sleepless, electronic dreamworld—fitting for a song with lyrics unsure of their direction in the wake of emotional devastation. It’s such a lush track, bottling the feeling of breaking into a run and never looking back.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester – Maya MacGregor – “Why can’t you talk about it?/I got used to being on the other side of truth/Now I never ask for details/Who the hell needs details?/When everything is burning/You light a fire on the grave…”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Books

🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈The Bookish Mutant’s Books for Pride Month (2026 Edition)🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Posted on June 4, 2026June 4, 2026 by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Thursday, bibliophiles!

Here in the U.S., June is Pride Month! You know the drill. I hate how bittersweet these posts are, and the bitter keeps growing. I see the beauty of this month and our queer community, but I can’t help but shrivel from the reminders that there have been repeated attempts to take queer books off the shelves across the country, and that the trans community here in the states has been under attack more than ever. My heart truly, truly hurts for all of us. I hurt. Of course, here I am, being cisgender in my cushy blue state with an openly gay governor, but nonetheless, I hurt whenever any other member of the queer community is hurt.

I’ve been an out and proud bisexual for almost eight years. Not long, in the grand scheme of things, but these years have taught me so much about queer people and the LGBTQ+ community. If there’s anything that I see in us, it’s our tenacity. No matter the slew of hateful legislation and rhetoric, we always come back stronger than ever. If there’s anything that the queer community doesn’t do, it’s back down in the face of a threat. In spite of the never-ending threats from outside and inside (the infighting never stops, y’all need to be normal about each other, please), we are like dandelions pushing through the cracks in the pavement: we never surrender, and we continue to bloom in the face of adversity.

But here’s the thing. I don’t like having to be this resilient. I don’t think any of us do. But if there’s anything to take solace in, it’s that our community is so strong and diverse that there will always be someone fighting. Yes, we all have to do what we must, but it’s important to remember that simply surviving, just being, is resistance in the face of the government wanting the public to believe that we aren’t worthy of the same rights as everybody else and that our stories are not fit for public consumption. You don’t have to be out and proud. All you have to do is be.

So here’s my annual pride month recommendations list of queer books from a variety of genres and backgrounds. I’ve compiled all kinds of books from various sexual orientations and gender identities, as well as backgrounds (queer people of color, disabled queer people, queer immigrants, etc.). Hopefully there’s something for everyone. (As always, if I’ve mistakenly identified anything on this list, please let me know! I’m only human.)

Now, more than ever, it’s crucial to support the LGBTQ+ community (especially the trans community, who are under attack more than ever) in whatever way you can. If you want to show your support them monetarily, here are some great organizations to donate to:

This is a non-exhaustive list, and I encourage you to seek out organizations in your area! There are so many wonderful people across the country (and the world) doing great work for the LGBTQ+ community.

A refresher on my key:

MC: Main character

LI: Love interest

SC: Side character(s)

For my posts from previous years, click below:

Let’s begin, shall we?

🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈THE BOOKISH MUTANT’S BOOKS FOR PRIDE MONTH (2025 EDITION)🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

FANTASY:

When the Tides Held the Moon – Venessa Vida Kelley | Adult | gay/demisexual MC, gay LI, mlm relationship | POC, historical fiction, romance | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea – Rebecca Thorne | Adult | lesbian MC, lesbian LI, nonbinary SC | cozy fantasy, disability, romance | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
Somadina – Akwaeke Emezi | YA | queer MC, several queer/trans SCs | POC, high fantasy, romance | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
Funeral Songs for Dying Girls – Cherie Dimaline | YA | sapphic MC | POC, disability, paranormal, urban fantasy, romance | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.75
Lady’s Knight – Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner | YA | sapphic MC and LI, wlw relationship | epic fantasy, romance | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Call Forth a Fox – Markelle Grabo | YA | bisexual MC, sapphic LI, wlw relationship | high fantasy, romance | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Library of Broken Worlds – Alaya Dawn Johnson | YA | sapphic MC and LI, wlw relationship, several queer/gender-nonconforming SCs (queernormative world, widespread use of neopronouns) | space fantasy, romance, POC | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.75
Direct Descendant – Tanya Huff | Adult | lesbian MC, several queer SCs | paranormal, urban fantasy, romance | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

SCIENCE FICTION:

The Two Lies of Faven Sythe – Megan O’Keefe | Adult | sapphic MC and LI, wlw relationship, several queer SCs | space opera, romance | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.75
The Ephemera Collector – Stacy Nathaniel Jackson | Adult | sapphic MC | dystopia, disability, POC | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Redsight – Meredith Mooring | Adult | bisexual MC, sapphic LI, wlw relationship, several queer SCs | space opera | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Of Monsters and Mainframes – Barbara Truelove | Adult | nonbinary MC, sapphic MC, sapphic SC | horror, space opera, space fantasy | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
Failure to Communicate – Kaia Sønderby | Adult | bisexual/polyamorous MC, queer/poly SC, several queer SCs | space opera, disability | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Strange Bedfellows – Ariel Slamet Ries | YA | transmasc MC, queer LI, mlm relationship | disability, romance, POC | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
Red Star Rebels – Amie Kaufman | YA | bisexual MC | thriller, romance, hard sci-fi |⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Murder by Memory – Olivia Waite | Adult | sapphic MC, wlw relationship, various queer SCs | cozy mystery, novella | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
Ancestral Night – Elizabeth Bear | Adult | lesbian MC, various queer SCs | disability, space opera | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
Interstellar Megachef – Lavanya Lakshminarayan | Adult | lesbian MC, wlw relationship, several queer SCs | cozy sci-fi, POC, space opera, romance | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
Volatile Memory – Seth Haddon | Adult | sapphic trans woman MC, sapphic LI, several queer SCs | novella, romance | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
Unexploded Remnants – Elaine Gallagher | Adult | trans woman MC, several queer SCs | space opera, novella | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.75
A Swift and Sudden Exit – Nico Vincenty | Adult | bisexual MC, lesbian LI, several queer SCs | time travel, romance, dystopia |⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
The Infinite Miles – Hannah Fergesen | Adult | sapphic MC and LI, several queer SCs | time travel | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe – Alex White | Adult | sapphic MC and LI, wlw relationship, several queer SCs | space opera | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
The Obake Code – Makana Yamamoto | Adult | queer MC, nonbinary LI, several queer side characters | thriller, dystopia, romance, POC | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

REALISTIC/HISTORICAL FICTION:

The Loudest Silence – Sydney Langford | YA | aroace MC, bisexual MC, several queer SCs | POC, disability, coming of age | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye – Briony Cameron | Adult | bisexual MC, several queer SCs | POC, historical fiction, disability, romance | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
Open Throat – Henry Hoke | Adult | queer, gender non-conforming MC, queer LI | animal POV, literary fiction, novella | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.25 *
Amelia, If Only – Becky Albertalli | YA | bisexual MC, bisexual SC, several queer SCs | romance, coming-of-age | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
If We Were a Movie – Zakiya N. Jamal | YA | sapphic MC and LI, wlw relationship, nonbinary SC, aroace SC | POC, romance | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin | Adult | gay MC and LI | classics, literary fiction |⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
According to Plan – Christen Randall | YA | nonbinary, bisexual MC, bisexual LI, queer relationship, several queer SCs | disability, romance | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
The Golden Boy’s Guide to Bipolar – Sonido Reyes | YA | bisexual MC, lesbian, gay, nonbinary, and bisexual SCs | POC, disability, coming of age | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5 **

*it’s worth noting that the main character of this novella is a mountain lion, but I feel like it still counts.

**the cover for The Golden Boy’s Guide to Bipolar has not yet been updated to reflect Sonido Reyes’s name change.

ANTHOLOGIES (VARIOUS GENRES):

Being Ace: An Anthology of Queer, Trans, Femme, and Disabled Stories of Asexual Love and Connection – edited by Madeline Dyer | YA | various queer identities throughout, with a focus on the asexual/aromantic spectrum | science fiction, fantasy, disability, POC | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope – edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older | Adult | various queer identities throughout | speculative fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, nonfiction essays, feminism | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.75
A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others – Teresa Carmody | Adult | various queer identities throughout | literary fiction | ⭐️⭐️⭐️.75

NONFICTION:

Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir – Lamya H. | Adult | POC, memoir, religion, feminism | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza – Gloria Anzaldúa | Adult | POC, essays, poetry, feminism | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Messy Roots – Laura Gao | YA | POC, graphic novel, memoir | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex – Angela Chen | Adult | POC, nonfiction, sociology | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK! Have you read any of these books, and if so, what did you think of them? What are some of your favorite queer books that you’ve read recently? Let me know in the comments!

Today’s song:

That’s it for this recommendations post! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

ARC Reviews, Book Review Tuesday

ARC Review: Mother & Slaughter

Posted on June 2, 2026June 2, 2026 by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Whew, this header’s been gathering some serious dust. I don’t do ARCs regularly anymore, but basically consider this my regular Book Review Tuesday installment…just with some more intrigue, since this book is less than a month away from release!

As I said before, I’ve gotten too busy to regularly review ARCs in the past few years, but this is an exception. The author of this upcoming novel (Liz Shipton) came across my blog and personally reached out to ask if I could review their ARC, so I said yes! Sadly, it pains me to say that this satirical fantasy was kind a miss.

Enjoy this week’s ARC review!

Mother & Slaughter – Liz Shipton

150 years ago, all of Draconia’s women were stripped of their magic. Now, their only options once they turn eighteen are to become mothers or gladiators. Eleanor Skinner was content to choose the latter, and has spent her days fighting her way to the top. At 35, she’s Draconia’s oldest gladiator, and proud to claim the title. But when she becomes pregnant after a one-night stand, her options are slim. Rumors have swirled about Draconia’s only magic-practicing woman left, who might be able to give her the abortion she’ll need. But Draconia is full of patriarchal monsters, and Eleanor will have to claw her way to freedom.

TW/CW: misogyny, violence, gore, blood, abortion themes, sexual content, racism, transphobia, xenophobia/anti-immigrant rhetoric, homophobia, ableism (internalized/external), animal death

Thank you to Liz Shipton for sending me this eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Giving an ARC a low rating is always tough. It’s especially tough since Liz Shipton was nice enough to reach out to me personally and give me this ARC, which I really appreciate. But with every ARC, I promise an honest review, and an honest review is what this is. I really wanted to like Mother & Slaughter, but it tripped over itself too many times to be truly successful.

If you’re going into Mother & Slaughter thinking that it’ll be subtle satire…it’s not. And honestly? That’s okay. There’s a place for both kinds of political allegory in this literary ecosystem. Mother & Slaughter is a revenge fantasy about tearing down the Trump administration, which I am 100% behind. Unfortunately, while I’m 100% behind Shipton’s politics, the delivery was not my cup of tea. This book basically feels like if we lived in a better, kinder universe where Quentin Tarantino was somehow woke. (For what it’s worth, I think Mother & Slaughter is the perfect book for anybody who was brutally grossed out by The Bride’s speech about “motherhood” at the end of Kill Bill: Volume 2. If Kill Bill: Volume 2 has no haters, then I am no longer here.) It’s a very bloody and irreverent novel, and it definitely tested my squeamishness for gore. The chemistry and banter between the characters was good, but it just wasn’t my kind of humor. There’s no shortage of swearing—we’re talking at least 5 f-bombs per page here, so that’s what you’re getting into. My issues with this aspect in particular are purely personal and not about the craft—it was written decently enough, but it just wasn’t the book for me in this regard.

Mother & Slaughter tackles almost everything you could think of that’s wrong with the Trump administration; misogyny and womanhood take center stage, but there’s also lots of discussions of homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, racism, and the persecution of scientists and scholars. I think the depictions of misogyny and the struggles women have under this administration were well done and well-realized through Eleanor’s character. There was some nice disability inclusion with Eleanor and Roz, who both had sustained permanent injuries from being gladiators. I also liked how respectfully Sam (who is a trans woman) was handled as a character; Eleanor and Roz butt heads about how to treat her, but ultimately, they both come to respect her as her true self—and as a victim of the same patriarchal system that they’ve been fighting against. There’s some timely discussions about immigration and anti-immigrant rhetoric which was solidly done. Shipton also attempts to tackle racism through the character of Roz; I will say, although her character gained more depth later, my biggest complaint is that for the first half of the book, Roz felt like she was only there to teach Eleanor that racism existed. This was remedied later, but it’s still worth mentioning as a writing flaw. Additionally, I’m not sure if the racism commentary was done well, as we never really get any context for how racism is systemic in Draconia (as misogyny/transphobia/etc. are), and there’s only some offhanded comments about how women of color are oversexualized and discriminated against without factoring it into how the government oppresses people of color in Draconia.

Politics take center stage in Mother & Slaughter, which is as it should be. I’m not asking for this novel to be some masterfully-crafted, intricate world, because first and foremost, it’s a political satire. That being said, I think it would’ve been much more effective if there was more effort put into the worldbuilding. It’s basically your run-of-the-mill, vaguely medieval European fantasy setting, but with more anachronistic language and dialogue. (I kind of expected the anachronisms given that this book’s tagline is “Slay, girl,” but it’s worth noting.) Yet aside from the government’s strict control of women and immigrants, I really couldn’t tell you how the government works. In order for this kind of satire to work, there needs to be at least some scaffolding of the world in order for us to understand our own politics through the lens of a fantasy world. The real fun of satire in genre fiction is to warp our own reality into a fictional one, and in this case, it just felt like a cheap copy-and-paste of current U.S. politics onto a hastily thought-out fantasy world. Fiction holds a mirror to parts of our world, but it’s really not much fun if the mirror is indistinguishable from the real world itself.

This issue is exacerbated in the ending, in which we finally meet Draconia’s Trump stand-in, who is…blatantly just Trump poorly photoshopped into a fantasy world. Like I said, the real fun of ridiculing horrible demagogues like him is by warping them to fit a fantasy setting. Once again, I recognize that this book wasn’t meant to be subtle, but a lack of subtlety shouldn’t mean a lack of creativity. Reknaw says “yuge,” he calls the main characters “nasty women,” and he even mentions a “big, beautiful bill.” As much as I loathe the man, it just felt so lazy and cheap to have no effort whatsoever put into this Trump parody. This is an exceedingly niche reference here, but remember Hellboy: Blood and Iron? They have their stand-in, comically evil oligarch character (Oliver Trombolt) whose name is just multiple real-life oligarchs (Trump being one of them) mashed up, but at least he didn’t look like a clone of Trump (or any of his other inspirations)! the bar’s real low. Even the artwork looks exactly like him. It…gets to a point. Well-intentioned satire, once again, but it just felt so unoriginal when there’s a myriad of ways to critique this administration and the scumbags within it.

Overall, a satirical fantasy with good intentions but a bloody mess of an execution. 2 stars.

Release date: July 1st, 2026

Mother & Slaughter is a standalone, and will be released on July 1st, 2026. Liz Shipton is also the author of Dot Slash Magic, the Thalassic series (Salt, Sand, Soul, Paz, and Passage), and several other books for teens and adults.

Today’s song:

yes, I know this song has one of the most threatening auras of any Brian Eno track, but I just CANNOT STOP LISTENING TO IT god I love this album

That’s it for this week’s ARC Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs – 5/31/26

Posted on May 31, 2026 by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

BEFORE I GET INTO IT: my longtime best friend has joined me in creating a book blog! It’s over on Wix, but it’s well worth migrating to another website to see her excellent book reviews. Go show Daisy’s Fables some love!!

This week: this one really feels like I’m a 12-year-old holding up my interests and talking at you about them, but that’s what blogs are for, right?

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 5/31/26

“Huey Newton” – St. Vincent

Sit down. I’m yapping about St. Vincent’s self-titled album again. You WILL listen. You subscribed to this blog, this is the price you pay…

I really haven’t changed since the age of 12, huh? It really makes pieces of my soul wither to see companies running with the joking “your inner child needs a little treat” expressions and turning the healing experience of becoming one with your inner child corporate. No, your inner child doesn’t need the new Starbucks drink, or whatever. That being said, preordering the 10th anniversary pressing of St. Vincent’s self-titled album was for me, but also my inner 12-year-old. As I sat there listening to it, I could feel her curled up inside of me like a chrysalis. I feel like I’m slowly becoming everything she wanted me to be.

But present me reveres St. Vincent as much as 12-year-old me did. Now that I’m older, it’s become one of those puzzle boxes of albums with new layers that reveal themselves every time you listen to it. (And that’s saying something, because I listened to it a concerning amount in middle school.) For me, this listen made me realize that this album is musically and thematically sound. There isn’t as much of a narrative to it as some of St. Vincent’s other albums, but throughout the many modern anxieties that she dishes out, there’s this through line of life being swallowed by the Internet; it’s meant to be more of a near-future thing, if her cult leader persona is anything to go by, but it rang true in 2014—and today. Clark wrote “Huey Newton” as a loose stream of consciousness song; the reference to the Black Panther Huey Newton is only relevant because of a vivid dream she’d had about him after taking a high dose of Ambien. For Clark, the lyrics are “tied to the next in a way that I don’t even understand…It has the feel of an extended Google search, and is set in the near future, after a long winter.” It is kind of a sonic doomscroll in the way that it pinballs from one disconnected image to the next. But you can see the intention of the artifice of the Internet that comes through in some of these images; “Fake knife, real catcher,” or “fuckless pawn sharks” evoke the ease of which people construct their identities even though there’s nothing behind the curtain. 12 years later, her image of a lawless internet populated by fakers and criminals has become even realer, with the blight of AI polluting what was already polluted in the first place. (For the record, I’m taking the line “Cowboys of Information” as the name for my purely hypothetical St. Vincent cover band.)

“Entombed in a shrine/Of zeroes and ones” remains one of the hardest lines on the album, if only in delivery alone. “Huey Newton” switches from a more restrained, dreamy piece of indie synth-pop before launching a salvo of guitar shrapnel in your face at the 2:37 mark. Every line is spit as her signature guitars dissolve into glitch-like fuzz. It all sounds distinctly pixelated, aggressive in its assault, as though the false veil of the digital world is being torn apart by a virus before your eyes. The beauty of St. Vincent to me is that the layers on “Huey Newton” are present on every song—everything has digitized tree rings hewn into it, every one revealing something about the vibrant tapestry of this album’s dystopian, digital world.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Machinehood – S.B. Divya – “Entombed in a shrine of zeros and ones, you know/You know/Oh, with fatherless features/You motherless creatures/You know…”

“Greta” – Cate Le Bon

Cate! Le Bon! Cannot! Make! A! Bad! Album!

Genuinely baffling how one person can be this talented. Sure, there are weaker spots in her catalogue, but I don’t think there’s such a thing as a bad Cate Le Bon song. I’ve just listened to CYRK, her second album, and it’s just as inventive as some of her later work, though quite different in sound. Before she crafted atmospheres from saxophones and synths, she had a more traditionally indie rock sound, but not without the unique lyrical and vocal touches that she’s always carried. CYRK as a whole is playful (fitting for an album named for the Polish word for “circus”), an adventurous branching-out into whatever struck Le Bon’s fancy. In spirit, it reminds me a lot of Björk’s early work, where she was just putting out feelers wherever she wanted, with only the intention to make daring music.

“Playful” doesn’t exactly describe “Greta” though. It’s one of the slower, more contemplative songs on the album; aside from the vaguely trumpet detour at the end, most of it relies on muted guitar and bass. For that reason, it came out of nowhere for me. What also came out of nowhere was how emotionally moving this track is; Le Bon softly sings of a subject with “eyes the size of lagoons/Dreaming wild” and whose baby days are “coiled up inside her like ribbons all tied.” It feels like she took a telescope and looked down at me as a child, my eyes turned skyward. There’s something about it that feels like a comforting lullaby, from the references to a child born in the stars to the slow rhythm, fit for gently rocking a cradle back and forth. It feels like an ode to every weird child who refused to let the weirdness get beaten out of them, no matter how hard the world tried. If I’d heard this as a kid, I feel like I would’ve found infinite solace in it, but now that I’m hearing it as an adult, it feels like a potent reminder to keep the child alive, to not let the ribbons of baby days get tangled or forgotten, and to remember that all of us are made of star stuff.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Beautyland – Marie-Helene Bertino – “Observatories clocked you in the stars/They were holding you so dear/Greta, be good to yourself/You’ve always been here.”

“I Might” – Wilco

The Whole Love does not get the love it deserves. Fully acknowledging that I have a fog of nostalgia surrounding my head whenever I talk about this album, this album is severely underrated. I think the problem with Wilco’s discography is that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is such an obvious, career-defining best that it overshadows so much of the adventurous work that they’ve made in the decades since. And if we’re talking about adventurous, then we need to talk about The Whole Love, an unexpected buffet of Wilco’s classic alt-rock sound and explorations out into both the electronic and folk worlds. “Art of Almost” and “Sunloathe” really shouldn’t be on the same album in theory, but The Whole Love makes it happen.

This album was the first Wilco release I remember being…well, conscious for. I was in elementary school when it came out; I specifically remember my dad playing the album all the way through while driving to work and watching the Popeye crossover music video for “Dawned On Me” at the old studio where I took piano lessons. So even before I went through the whole album on my own, I’d already listened to the whole thing. “I Might” was one of the many songs on the album that remained in a nameless limbo in my memory as A Wilco Song That Certainly Exists, but I couldn’t put it to a concrete song. It sounds like your average Wilco song from the 2010’s, with its driving rock sound and cheery organs, but even though it’s not as full-throttle weird as “Art of Almost” (which comes right before it on the album…talk about whiiiiplaaaaash), it has the spirit of “let’s try everything, what’s the worst that could happen?” Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics are nonsensical and free-association (“Your sno-cone/And it’s piss and blood,” anyone?) and the chorus of “You won’t set the kids on fire/Oh, but I might” is…wild, obviously, but the more I listen to it, the more it feels like it’s a defiant statement of turning his past work—and people’s expectations of the band—upside down and destroying them. The Whole Love came out of its ashes, and to me, it’s still one of the most daring albums in their catalogue.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Obake Code – Makana Yamamoto – “It’s in the cards, oh oh/’Get Well Soon – everybody’/Do all lies have a taste?/Let it go, I don’t know, oh…”

“Advice & Vices” – Chelsea Wolfe

I’d forgotten about “Advice & Vices” since…at least high school, around the time I had my Chelsea Wolfe awakening proper and listened to The Grime and the Glow, her first album. Hearing a song like this brings up so many contradictions—I love it, but I simultaneously feel like it’s slightly distant from the music she’d become known for, and yet it feels so innately Chelsea Wolfe. It’s always been goth, but it’s not cloaked in quite the same foreboding atmosphere as much of her later work. The album is much more lo-fi, and yet you can already see the seeds of her signature style germinating; “Advice & Vices” feels like a more understated indie rock song, until you hear Wolfe’s muted ghostlike howls recorded at the very end of the song. Her voice is already strong here, and it’d only get stronger. But it’s like watching Wolfe fish in a frozen lake for what would become her sound; the ice is melting, and around it is what would become the iconic artist that I love today. She was always that good.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The King Must Die – Kemi Ashing-Giwa – “I never listen to my own best advice, no/Like one thing leads to another/Like one heart bleeds for another/And everybody wants what they can’t have…”

“New Muscles” – mary in the junkyard

The cynical part of me is starting to think that mary in the junkyard (or their management) might’ve just been too good at picking singles. But the more optimistic part of me is starting to think that Role Model Hermit is going to be such a fun album. We’re at three singles now ahead of the album’s July release, and each one has been so different from the other—this is pretty much worlds apart from “Candelabra.” It’s also a very different song than I’ve expected from mary in the junkyard, and…I love it.

“New Muscles” is such an uplifting, confidence-boosting song. But from the more gloomy instrumentation, full of strings and percussion that sounds like somebody’s whacking a plastic bucket with a spoon, you wouldn’t think it. Yet it’s the perfect song for dusting yourself off and getting back on your feet. It’s all about emerging from a cocoon and embracing all of the possibilities of your new, stronger, and more healed self: “I’ve been getting up and getting out/Working out and working on myself/New muscles all over my back/New muscles all over my back.” It feels like the spiritual successor to Wilco’s “Kicking Television” in terms of empowering indie rock songs about self-improvement that totally avoid sounding corny. It has a playful element to it (“I will take you down with one finger”), but it balances the joking “they’ll never see the new me coming” attitude with a genuine, sparkling hope for the wonderful things that’ll happen once you start exercising these new muscles and putting that healing self to work. “New Muscles” came out at a very advantageous time in my life—I’ve been feeling some version of this song for a while, what with trying to claw my way out of a multitude of bad habits and becoming more independent in my life. It really does feel like emerging from a chrysalis, even though I know that I’ll probably be emerging from a number of chrysalises over the course of my life. For now, I’m taking this new self to better places. Here’s to flexing your new muscles.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Juliet Takes a Breath – Gabby Rivera – “Courage in my bones/I embrace the thunder and the lightning/I will make it so hard to forget me…”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/26/26) – The Killing Spell

Posted on May 26, 2026May 26, 2026 by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

As I’ve been doing my AAPI books focus during AAPI Heritage Month over the years, I noticed that I’ve unintentionally neglected the PI part of the acronym, which is a real shame. Unfortunately, as with a lot of marginalized groups, it’s difficult to find books—especially genre fiction—by marginalized authors; in fact, The Killing Spell is billed as the first traditionally published adult fantasy by a Native Hawaiian author, which…insert the “disappointed, but not surprised” meme. It took until 2026 for this to happen? Christ.

Anyways, I was intrigued by that, and by the urban fantasy premise. In the end, The Killing Spell was a fun and ambitious fantasy debut.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Killing Spell – Shay Kauwe

200 years ago, a flood of unforeseen proportions changed the world forever. The Hawaiian Islands were submerged in the ocean, and the survivors found refuge on the coast of California. Kea Petrova lives in this Hawaiian Homestead in what remains of Los Angeles, honing her language-based magic. Discriminated against by the powers that be—both because of her heritage and her magic—she tries to keep her head down. But when a powerful politician is murdered by a killing spell connected to the Hawaiian language, Kea has a target on her back. Desperate to prove her innocence, she teams up with a corrupt politician to clear her name. But what they’ll uncover may shake the magical world of L.A. to its very foundations…

TW/CW: murder, violence, sexual harassment, racism, colonialism/imperialism themes

The Killing Spell is a great debut, but what stands out about it is that I can just feel how much fun Shay Kauwe had while writing it. Though it wasn’t without its flaws, I could feel that same sense of fun and adventure on every page of this novel. I guarantee that you’ll have a blast reading it!

The characters in The Killing Spell are also a standout for sure. Kea was such a compelling main character; she has that perfect combination of being flawed enough to seem real but likable enough to root for. She’s headstrong and stubborn more often than not (to be fair, it’s justified half the time), but she’s so determined and witty that it almost makes up for it. She had the perfect combination of traits to make all of her adventures instantly worth following. The other characters were differing degrees of fun and campy, which suited the classic murder mystery atmosphere. The only character that I didn’t like as much was Sora. He was a little too cliched for my liking, and as much as I love a good enemies-to-lovers arc, Kea and Sora lacked romantic chemistry to me. The romance subplot was just forced in general—thinking back to the story as a whole, it really didn’t enhance anything about it. But he’s the exception to the rule—Shay Kauwe’s characters were a joy to follow.

Despite The Killing Spell being set 200 years in the future, it checked off all of the boxes for a fun murder mystery. I think I just like genre fiction-mystery/thriller melds in general—they just present so many fun opportunities to use worldbuilding to make a compelling world and explain the structures of it by showing you what it means for things to go wrong. There’s so much here for the diehard fantasy fans, but I think if you’re a mystery reader who wants to get into fantasy, you should absolutely pick up The Killing Spell. The setting is modern enough for a lot of the classic murder mystery beats to happen, and with the right balance of seriousness and camp; you’ve got your mysterious poisonings, unlikely detective teams, and seducing people for clues in a dance hall, all wrapped up in a futuristic fantasy package. What was clear to me was that The Killing Spell was Kauwe’s love letter to both genres, and that passion was evident with every successive page.

Language-based magic was already a fascinating magic system for Shay Kauwe to explore, but it bolsters the novel’s themes, which were one of The Killing Spell‘s biggest strengths. Many of the characters (most prominently Kea) are Native Hawaiian, and there is so much discussion about sovereignty and land ownership, as well as the preservation of Indigenous cultures. But I think the language magic and the discussions of the “legitimacy” of languages was the strongest theme in the novel. Through this magic system, Kauwe starts some very cogent discussions about what languages that people and governments deems “important” in its often Eurocentric view, and the bias against languages that don’t have as many speakers; there’s also lots of very potent discussions about cultural pride and how it can be an act of resistance when the dominant, hegemonic cultures are bent on deeming it “lesser.” Kauwe’s pride in Native Hawaiian culture shone through in The Killing Spell, and from an outside perspective, I think these kinds of perspectives are so vital to fantasy as a genre.

Most of the elements above would’ve added up to a solid four stars for me. I had some minor nitpicks, but most of them aren’t very relevant. What is relevant, however, is the worldbuilding, which left a lot to be desired. Aside from the language-based magic, which was well-thought out and thematically strong, the worldbuilding got messy. The whole impetus for the emergence of magic was this cataclysmic flood, which somehow released this language magic into the world. How this happened just…isn’t explained. At all. There was a flood, the Hawaiian Islands sunk, and…magic appeared? I guess? And The Killing Spell happens 200 years after said flood. You’d think that there would be some sort of major societal change, right? Other than the vague system of magical mobs that rule L.A., we get no explanation as to how the world reorganized itself or how magic changed society at large. This is supposed to be 200 years in the future, but nothing would’ve changed if this was just an urban fantasy set today. Other than the Hawaiian Homestead plot, we don’t get any real consequences of how the world changed after the flood. And locations outside of America get mentioned, but what the hell happened to them? Come to think of it, what’s going on in America outside of L.A.? Ultimately, the foundation was there, but Kauwe didn’t expand on it nearly enough for the worldbuilding to actually hold water.

All in all, an action-packed debut rife with magic, mystery, and intrigue. 3.75 stars!

The Killing Spell is Shay Kauwe’s debut novel, and a standalone.

Today’s song:

ANOTHER BANGER CATE LE BON ALBUM IN THE BOOKS! cyrk is excellent, and this song makes me emotional out of nowhere…

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 5/24/26

Posted on May 24, 2026 by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: inventive covers, timeless anthems, and some classic quirked-up white boy music.

Enjoy this week’s review!

SUNDAY SONGS: 5/24/26

“A Mistake” – Fiona Apple

If we live long enough under the patriarchy, most of us women have the urge to permanently destroy something at least once in their lives. Once is generous, honestly…have you read the news lately? For Fiona Apple, who had been heavily scrutinized under the public eye and lambasted by music critics in the years leading up to When the Pawn…, the urge must’ve been constant. That’s why “A Mistake” feels so genuine. It’s a slinky, trip-hoppy track about breaking free of society’s expectation of a “good girl” and deliberately wrecking things, fully cognizant of the consequences but not caring in the slightest: “And when the day is done and I look back/And the fact is I had fun/Fumbling around/All the advice I shunned, and I ran/Where they told me not to run/But I sure had fun.” No matter if you act on it, Apple taps into that universal urge to raise hell after being boxed in and stymied by expectations of femininity (“I wanna make a mistake/Why can’t I make a mistake?”), societal control, and an urge to just rebel, even if you don’t know what against. And then there’s the element of deliberately going against good advice—Apple’s trail of destruction, by her own admission, isn’t entirely justified, but there’s that constant, biting urge to defy well-meaning advice anyway. After all, “And if you wanna make sense/Whatcha lookin’ at me for?/I’m no good at math.” It’s all wrapped up in a complex package, not always thoughtful, but from a messy, nonsensical place of rage with nowhere to go. Screeching guitars that give the effect of buzzing insects and a luscious synth loop to back it all up, creating a fully-fledged ode to giving into your most reckless urges.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Gideon the Ninth – Tamsyn Muir – “So I’m gonna fuck it up again/I’m gonna do another detour/Unpave my path/And if you wanna make sense/Whatcha lookin’ at me for?/I’m no good at math…”

“Crosseyed and Painless” – Talking Heads

This might be the moment where I finally, finally get into Talking Heads. My brother recently listened to Remain In Light and introduced me to a handful of songs from it; apparently, he’d also fully Mandela-effected the idea that I owned a Remain In Light t-shirt, so maybe I should just listen to it. So much has been said about the album: the fusion of rock, funk, and early hip-hop, the influence of Afrobeats, the early electronic instrumentals. And all of that’s there. But you know what strikes me immediately?

Brian Eno. This just reeks of Eno. I mean, he obviously produced this album, but his rhythmic influence is so clear. “No One Receiving,” one of my favorite songs of his, is very Talking Heads, and he’d worked with the band on several albums at that point. But the frantic, anxious rhythms of “Crosseyed and Painless” and the chirping electronics are so Brian Eno. (He also provides backing vocals on the chorus, and Byrne’s certainly got some “King’s Lead Hat” in the delivery.) Maybe I just love it because of the Eno by proxy. But I feel like that would be a disservice to David Byrne and co., whose unique touch seems to have made Remain In Light so iconic. First off—oh my God, Tina Weymouth’s bass playing is nothing short of phenomenal. Once she finds the groove, she grabs ahold and never lets go. I think Byrne is what separates this from Eno in the end—though they share the same kind of angular energy, Byrne’s seamless shifts between desperate crooning in the chorus to frantic, anxious proto-rapping in the bridge: “Facts all come with points of view/Facts don’t do what I want them to/Facts just twist the truth around/Facts are living with their insides out.” That’s just nothing but David Byrne, as is this song’s spirit, in the end. Eno bolstered it, but the sweaty-palmed sprint through a state of alienation is nothing but Talking Heads.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Volatile Memory – Seth Haddon – “Nothing there/No information left of any kind/Lifting my head/Looking for the danger signs…”

“Modern Girl” – Sleater-Kinney

I hate to say it, but the strongest memory I have of hearing “Modern Girl” was hearing Sleater-Kinney play it live while co-headlining with Wilco about five years back. They did the classic “this is our big song, sing it with us!” thing and tried to get the crowd to sing the chorus…and only a handful of people did. Yeesh. Probably some of the largest-scale secondhand embarrassment I’ve ever felt. But they’re plenty successful, well-known, and presumably happy with their lives, so I can’t imagine that one (1) crowd in Colorado not singing along with them made much of a dent on their egos.

Nonetheless, “Modern Girl” is one of the songs I took away from that setlist all the way back in 2021. Despite the painful mix on the version I have (once it gets loud, it gets crunchier than a bass-boosted meme from 2018…somebody remaster this already, Jesus 😭), it has the same staying power. It’s an anthemic, gradually building story of mounting emptiness; every verse, happily sung until bitterly screamed, scrambles for meaning in a world of artifice. There’s a void (a donut hole, if you will) at the heart of “Modern Girl” that fruitlessly gets filled by consumerism, mass media, and hollow love. It’s a sort of universal story of filling the hole in your life with all the plastic that TV advertises, only to find that “My whole life/Looks like a picture of a sunny day”—beautiful on the surface, but really just a flimsy piece of film in the end. Where you end up is sprawled out, floundering in the drowning tide of distortion that gradually swallows Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker’s riffs and harmonicas. Sometimes, all you can do when faced with the emptiness at the heart of your life is shout at it—and shout Sleater-Kinney does.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

On Earth As It Is on Television – Emily Jane – “My baby loves me/I’m so angry/Anger makes me a modern girl/Took my money/I couldn’t buy nothin’/I’m sick of this brave new world…”

“Company In My Back” (Wilco cover) – Cate Le Bon

Somehow, while spreading the gospel of Cate Le Bon to my family, I completely missed this cover, which my brother thankfully found. Wilco Covered, a limited-edition album only available on CD (and another big thank you to my dad for digging it up on eBay), was a real mixed bag, but this cover is a staggeringly good fit for both Le Bon and Wilco. “Company In My Back” comes from A Ghost Is Born, and Jeff Tweedy’s signature lyricism was already at some of its delightfully weirdest; “I attack with love/Pure bug beauty/Curl my lips and crawl up to you” is still one of the more memorable Wilco openings if we’re going by lyrics alone. Add in the wording of the chorus (“Holy shit/There’s a company in my back”) and some dulcimer, and you’ve got one of the more left field early Wilco songs out there. The original’s clattering percussion, like bug’s legs against tile, are equally so. It’s natural that Le Bon covered it, given her weirdo proclivities. Her moody lilt and agitated instrumentals fit in so naturally in her interpretation of this song. (I especially love the way she sings “They are hissing radiator tunes.” Pure magic.) This was recorded in 2019, and Reward has its footprints all over it, with blasts of saxophone to replace the acoustic guitars of the guitar. It’s such an excellent tribute, turning “Company In My Back” almost inside out while lovingly preserving the offbeat-ness of the original without sacrificing her own artistry.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Half-Built Garden – Ruthanna Emrys – “You learn so slow, old radiant beauty/I’ll curve my flight…”

“I Wanna Be Adored” (Stone Roses cover) – King Woman

What makes a cover good to me is when it captures the song’s spirit; like I just talked about with Cate Le Bon’s take on “Company In My Back,” it messes around with the instrumentals but retains Jeff Tweedy’s soul beneath it. Though King Woman’s take on “I Wanna Be Adored” doesn’t reach those heights (and how could it, with the original basically defining a good portion of the alternative/indie rock sound of the ’90s?), I think it succeeds in the same way. While the Stone Roses’ original dips into a dreamy haze, King Woman’s cover basically sounds like Stone Roses by way of Chelsea Wolfe. It’s longer and more drawn-out, with sludgy guitars and a thick, foggy echo clouding everything. Kristina Esfandiari shouts the iconic chorus as though into the mouth of a canyon, pleading into a cold void, a stark contrast to the speed at which it’s sung in the original. It’s an exciting take on this song—one that clearly melds King Woman’s style into the original’s beating heart.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Redsight – Meredith Mooring – the sludgy, doomy atmosphere of this cover absolutely fits with this tale of dark magic in space.

BONUS: In addition to Programmes for Cools, Jim Noir has just released The DLC Tapes exclusively on Patreon—or you can buy it on his KoFi! It’s another album of polished releases from previous EPs and outtakes. Here’s the reworking of “Scene 2”:

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/19/26) – Silver Under Nightfall

Posted on May 19, 2026May 19, 2026 by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I read a handful of Rin Chupeco’s books in high school. I liked them for the most part, but I think I just lost interest eventually. Fast forward a few years, and I found out that they’d written another series for adults, and the premise hooked me. However, it seems like Chupeco’s writing doesn’t hold up now that I’m older. Silver Under Nightfall was just ridiculous in all the wrong ways.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Silver Under Nightfall (Silver Under Nightfall, #1) – Rin Chupeco

Remington Prendergast is a Reaper—a highly-trained bounty hunter who specializes in the most dangerous quarry: vampires. Even with his talents, the rumors surrounding his possibly vampire heritage have alienated him from his colleagues. His father, the Duke of Valenbonne, has been desperate to make his powers so great that they overshadow the rumors, but he’s failed. But when strange, deadly vampires, the likes of which the kingdom has never seen, begin to spread across the kingdom, Remy’s only choice is to turn to a pair of enigmatic vampires to solve the case—and risk being drawn into their seductive web.

TW/CW: blood, gore, sexual content, loss of loved ones, pedophilia, vomit, emotional abuse

I haven’t read a Rin Chupeco book since I was about 17. I really should’ve kept it that way. Silver Under Nightfall sounded fun and gothic enough from the premise, but this novel was bordered on being a disaster. It genuinely boggles my mind that this book has such a positive average rating on both Goodreads and The Storygraph. I endured 500 pages of this (probably should’ve DNF’d it), but now I have the evidence to hate from an educated stance…

Before I get into all my gripes, I’ll give Chupeco credit for the handful of things that they did well. Though it didn’t go in the direction I would’ve liked it to go, I loved the vampire murder mystery/thriller plot, and the genetically engineered monsters and subsequent fights were quite fun. There were moments where they nailed the gothic atmosphere, and there were a handful of solid quotes here and there. But unfortunately, these elements, despite being key to the premise, weren’t delivered on nearly enough, which is surprising, since Silver Under Nightfall is over 500 pages long. Unfortunately, most of that 500 pages is a poorly-written mess.

The last book of Chupeco’s that I read was The Ever Cruel Kingdom, which I honestly forgot about completely, other than the vague sensation of it being entertaining, but ultimately finishing it just to finish it. Not a great endorsement, I know. But even at that age, I had the sense that it felt overwritten, that there were random metaphors tripping over themselves. Unfortunately, that quality increased tenfold in Silver Under Nightfall. To Chupeco’s credit, their writing has some fun moments of being campy and gothic. In the end, they were just trying way too hard to be gothic. This resulted in so many sentences with nonsensical structure and metaphors that went on far longer than they humanly should have. At the worst points, the writing was so deliberately obtuse that I could barely get any sense of the setting or world beyond it. (Worldbuilding? Who is she?) It was just dense and unwieldy, and did very little to enhance the atmosphere.

Speaking of trying too hard, Chupeco’s dialogue was the worst victim of the above prose problem. It was terrible. All of the characters oscillated between talking like 15-year-old edgelords and fictional Victorian nobles, even though they’re all meant to be adults. The Victorian noble bit was painfully overwritten, carrying over the same problem of Chupeco’s floundering attempt at making Silver Under Nightfall gothic; again, a lot of the dialogue was stuffy at best, grammatically nonsensical at worst. On the other end of the spectrum, you have characters like Remy, who Chupeco spends 500 pages desperately trying to convince you that he’s funny.

Below is an actual quote from the book:

“…I’ve never infected anyone, if you don’t count my dry wit—”

Oh my God, free me from this prison. 90% of the humor in Silver Under Nightfall is 2017 Tumblr humor partially filtered through quasi-historical nobleman speak; like the specially-engineered vampire-creatures in the novel, it’s an unholy abomination that shouldn’t exist. And Chupeco really, really, really wants you to think that it’s funny, so much so that it supersedes most other elements that are important in a novel, like…oh, worldbuilding? Character development? No, apparently what matters most is making sure that the reader knows, beyond all reasonable doubt, that your character has a dry sense of humor. And he doesn’t. He, like most of this book, is painfully unfunny.

This brings me to the characters. I think the fundamental problem was that Chupeco seemed hellbent on making them as likable as possible, which in the novel, translated to them having virtually no flaws. We’re beaten over the head with the prospect that Remy is a poor widdle baby and nobody likes him because people think his mommy was a vampire but he’s also SO TALENTED and SPECIAL and EDGY and COOL. Textually, we get very little evidence to support this, other than his overlong monologues and the treatment he gets from his father. No character development, no revelations that aren’t external—stuff just happens to him, and Chupeco just paints him like this sad, wet puppy that got left out in the rain. Show me more interactions between him and the other Reapers! Give me some actual internal reflection and genuine grappling with his identity at the very least, dammit! As for the others, there’s not much to say about them…which is to say that most of them had one character trait each. Malekh and Xioadan were sexy, the Duke was a Bad, Bad Guy, and there were…a few others? I guess? Most of them got taken care of in the bloodbath towards the end. Silver Under Nightfall was just a classic case of a main character that was unrealistically overpowered and emo, and then all of the others were just window dressing (or threesome fodder).

However, I think the fundamental problem with the characters in Silver Under Nightfall was that Chupeco refused to give them any nuance. Remy, for how much of an edgelord he was purported to be, was purely good. Malekh and Xioadan were the same way—they were completely pure, despite the “oooh the evil vampires are seducing me ooooh 😏🫦” plot. There was a revelation at the end that could’ve complicated the relationship between Malekh and Remy in a super interesting way, but Chupeco immediately shuts it down in favor of Malekh being completely pure. Of course, all of the bad guys are completely bad. I wouldn’t even let this kind of black and white writing slide in a YA novel. It was such a lazy, uninteresting way to write these characters, especially when the novel touts itself as having all of these morally gray characters. None of the specialest, most precious little guys can have any sort of nuance or depth, I guess.

All in all, a bloated mess of a vampire novel with unwieldy writing and even worse character work. I feel like I’ve been drained…by Colin Robinson, maybe. 2 stars.

Silver Under Nightfall is the first in the Silver Under Nightfall duology, which concluded with Court of Wanderers. Chupeco is also the author of the Bone Witch series (The Bone Witch, The Heart Forger, and The Shadowglass), the Never Tilting World series (The Never Tilting World and The Ever Cruel Kingdom), the A Hundred Names for Magic trilogy (An Unreliable Magic, Wicked As You Wish, and The World’s End), The Sacrifice, and several other novels for teens and adults.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 5/17/26

Posted on May 17, 2026 by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: the inescapable march of time? Nah, no need to worry about that, let’s go frolic in a field, whee!

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 5/17/26

“Dead Man Walking” – David Bowie

The above meme has been my experience with Earthling. You know what I’ve been doing while listening to Earthling? That’s right…knitting a scarf, otherwise motionless, while my brain is vibrating at a speed that could shatter glass. God, I love Bowie.

Earthling really was a shock to my system. Even as a seasoned Bowie fan, you know in the abstract how easily he was able to adapt to musical genres and eras without necessarily sacrificing his own personal core. But it’s albums like Earthling that make you remember this in earnest; he adapts to the growing electronic and dance subcultures of the ’90s amphibiously, as if it had been the air he’d been breathing all along. It’s all a mishmash of influences, and if you’re looking for a microcosm of it, look no further than the multitudes in “Dead Man Walking”; yes, it’s a meditation on aging on the surface, but to me, it’s a conversation between the past and the present, at heart; originally, it was meant to be a tribute to Susan Sarandon (who he’d worked with on The Hunger) and her film Dead Man Walking, but after watching a performance by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, it inspired Bowie to write about the contrast of these aging rock n’ roll legends and the vitality that the music still contained. The ties to the past increase tenfold with Jimmy Page’s connection—he offered the chord progression of “Dead Man Walking” to Bowie all the way back in the ’60s (he had already recycled it for multiple songs, namely “The Supermen”).

The frenetic, thrumming drum n’ bass of this track encapsulates how nonlinear this experience of time is—the past is constantly communicating with the present and future, creating a constant conversation, a kind of tangled subway map of years and people. Leave it to Bowie to create such a concise meditation in the form of pulsating dance—it feels like this song should soundtrack a high-speed speeder chase in some cyberpunk movie. And as if we hadn’t gotten enough twists, now throw in Mike Garson doing Aladdin Sane-esque jazz piano at the very end. Naturally. Up until the end, his manifesto was to keep everybody on their toes—including himself, it seems.

BONUS: here’s an excellent clip of Bowie performing an acoustic version of “Dead Man Walking” with Reeves Gabrels for Conan O’Brien:

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Infinite Miles – Hannah Fergeson – “And I’m gone, gone, gone/(Gone, gone, gone spinning slack through reality)/Now I’m older than movies/(Dance my way, falling up through the years)/Let me dance away…”

“Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)” – Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians

A Globe of Frogs was, surprisingly, my first experience with listening to a Robyn Hitchcock project all the way through (not counting the Soft Boys); most of the tracks are excellent, but the average Robyn Hitchcock listening experience to me usually circles back around to “how does he manage to make this many good songs?” I swear that this is on the alternative-hit level of something like “Birds in Perspex” or “So You Think You’re In Love”—with how much indie airplay those two songs got, it’s baffling that “Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)” didn’t get it…okay, maybe it’s harder to sell a song with a title like that. But that doesn’t matter, right? Though it’s lyrically less weird than some of the other tracks on A Globe of Frogs, it distills Hitchcock’s undying love for the ’60s into a lovestruck, ’80s alternative track. It’s pure ’60s jangle all the way down (hence the Beatle in the title), breathlessly joyful; though that guitar brightness is straight-up Hitchcock, it made complete sense to hear that Peter Buck of R.E.M. also contributed his guitar skills to this album—it certainly has some of the same textures of Green, which came out around a year after A Globe of Frogs. It’s an encapsulation of the stages of love where you’re in so deep that nothing else matters—a plane could be crashing down in the studio, but we’re not there, are we? We’re in love, YIPPEE! God, it’s so delightful.

For the record, it’s an excellent duet. On A Globe of Frogs, he’s duetting with Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze, but for most of the live shows I’ve seen recently, it’s been with his wife, Emma Swift. It was so sweet when I saw him back in February, and it’s just as sweet here:

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Aurora Burning (The Aurora Cycle, #2) – Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff – tell me this wasn’t Auri and Kal frolicking around in the Echo while the rest of the galaxy was collapsing around them…

“Open Up” – Ratboys

It’s Wilco all the way down. I’ll just hear a song and like it, and bam. It’s just Wilco influence behind the Scooby-Doo villain mask.

For “Open Up” specifically, it didn’t hit me until I read frontwoman Julia Steiner’s interview about this song on Stereogum: “I love Wilco…They have records, Being There and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which both have these track ones that are these expansive scene-setters for the whole album and consist of a sequence of verses interspersed with beautiful noise. So that was sort of the template that I was excited to try to work within.” The openers in question are “Misunderstood” and “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” which…phew. That’s how you make an album opener, and it’s not exactly an easy act to follow.

Putting this in context makes me see exactly where “Open Up” gestated. Tinged with alt-country and led by Steiner’s vocals (which struck me as very Michelle Zauner, another Wilco fan), this track feels like An Opener. This is my first exposure to Ratboys, but already, I can see exactly where it takes shape; it’s got that slow, burbling build of a good opener that feels anthemic without giving everything about the album away. It never exactly gets to that “beautiful noise” that Steiner describes (no offense, but this isn’t “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” 2, but nothing could be, to be fair), but it’s got such a hold on that sense of catch-and-release, with teases of percussion and guitar that reel you in before the ending…well, opens up, no pun intended. Fitting, with the song’s thesis and chorus: “what’s it gonna take to open up?”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Failure to Communicate – Kaia Sønderby – “Pick all the locks inside our heads/It takes a while, in your defense/But I got lots of time/So what’s it gonna take to open up tonight?”

“Wash” – Floor Cry

I feel like a part of me will always be nostalgic for that specifically 2010’s flavor of lo-fi dream pop that was everywhere when I was in high school. My friend knew exactly what she was doing sending me this in a café while it was actively raining outside—that’s the proper way to listen to these kinds of songs. It’s whispery and understated, but “Wash” is such a calming track. Propelled by its looped guitar and muted percussion, it really evokes that particular moment in time where the newest tracks weren’t afraid of sounding like yes, this was made with just me, myself and I with GarageBand in my room. Felicia Sekundiak’s vocals nearly drown under the mix, but for a song about feeling like you’re floundering in every way, it fits, whether or not it was intentional.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Strange Bedfellows – Ariel Slamet Ries – “Swimming/’Til the water started spinning/Now I feel it down in my throat/Heart’s too heavy for a lifeboat…”

“Lucidity” – Tame Impala

It’s songs like this that make me forget that Tame Impala is ostensibly…pretty boring now. Or so I’ve heard. I’ve just heard “Dracula” everywhere, and yeah, it’s mediocre, not much else I can say about it. But you know how I knew that Tame Impala had gone downhill? Around the time when Deadbeat came out last year, I heard the hippie baristas at my local coffee shop grousing about how terrible it was. The minute Tame Impala loses the barista demographic, he’s done for.

So it’s kind of a shock to remember Kevin Parker’s beginnings. “Lucidity” popped into my head the other day, and it feels worlds away from where he is now. With its chugging guitars and Parker’s drifting vocals, it’s a fantastic piece of psychedelic rock. Fuzzy and trippy, it manages to toe that ever-thinning line between ’60s worship and modern sensibilities, and while it does kind of stumble over the former line, it never makes it lose its potency. It’s very Beatles, but if a time traveler went and gave John Lennon a ton of new guitar pedals. It’s undeniable what made Tame Impala such a sensation in the first place—he hit just the right chord here.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Slow Gods – Claire North – “Lucidity, come back to me/Put all five senses back to where they’re meant to be/Oh it’s hard to tell, breaks down/There is a will, there is a way…”

Since this song consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/12/26) – Interstellar Megachef

Posted on May 12, 2026 by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

It’s funny that I should be reading/reviewing Interstellar Megachef when I am, because just a week ago, I was talking to my older brother about how you sometimes have to wade through the most cornball book covers and titles known to man to find good cozy fiction sometimes. Different strokes, I guess, but oh my God, this book cover is painfully corny. (And mismarketed, but I’ll talk more about that). But ultimately, it was mostly worth the gambit: although it had some structural issues, it was a solid novel about food, love, and immigration…in space, of course.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Interstellar Megachef – Lavanya Lakshminarayan

Saraswati Kaveri is determined to prove herself. After running away from her family on Earth, she upends her life to immigrate to the famed planet Primus—and earn a spot on its most popular cooking show, Interstellar Megachef. It’s not an easy feat, especially when the humans of Primus are deeply prejudiced against Earthlings, who they see as backwards and violent. But when Saras’s plans go awry, she has a chance encounter with Serenity Ko, a disgraced tech developer who might have just the solution for her to redeem herself—and her cooking.

TW/CW: xenophobia/racism, racial slurs (fictional), substance abuse

First off: Interstellar Megachef is mismarketed. Cornball cover art aside, the Interstellar Megachef aspect of the book is fairly understated. This isn’t a spoiler, but Saras gets disqualified in the first episode of the show—and this happens about a quarter into the novel. (However, Interstellar Megachef comes back as a plot point, so it’s not entirely absent from the plot afterwards.) So I’m assuming that it was marketing reasons that gave this novel its title and tagline. So fair warning, if you’re expecting the entire novel to be food-centric, I’d suggest that you dial back your expectations.

Where Interstellar Megachef succeeds is its powerful commentary on the experience of being an immigrant. To me, good cozy sci-fi succeeds when it retains the low stakes, but doesn’t hold back on discussing whatever issues it seeks to tackle; Lakshminarayan does this to great success. Saras’s experiences as an Earthling immigrant to Primus were a biting indictment of how we treat immigrants, from the outright racism and xenophobia to the more subtle micro-aggressions that they’re taught to simply put up with. The labor that Saras has to do just to be marginally accepted by her Primian peers was poignant, and it spoke to the limits of “acceptance” that mainstream society often has for immigrants: she’s only valuable to them if she’s able to serve a purpose to them. But Saras’s commitment to going against the grain and staying true to her culture gave this novel a poignant, beating heart that propelled its narrative skyward.

Interstellar Megachef also boasts a particularly vibrant sci-fi world. Of course, there are elements that didn’t quite make me suspend my disbelief; I couldn’t quite believe that Earthling humans were more discriminated against than the nigh-incomprehensible mecha tentacle aliens, but that was necessary to the plot, so I get why that was a thing. (Also, the Primian naming convention of every adult being named after the Nine Virtues was okay in concept, but confusing logistically, when you have at least four characters with the same first name per virtue.) Lakshminarayan’s descriptions of this futuristic world were so bright and lived-in, and I truly felt immersed into this neon, intergalactic future for humanity. The aliens were fun, but I feel like their role in society was underutilized, especially when the themes of prejudice and marginalization are concerned. That being said, Lakshminarayan often delivered this worldbuilding in portions that went on for three paragraphs in some cases, which unceremoniously took away from the main narrative. All of the detail and hard work was there, but integrating smoothly into the narrative was a different story, unfortunately.

However, my biggest issue with Interstellar Megachef was the pacing. I’m used to some slowness when it’s cozy sci-fi that we’re talking about, but there were some parts of the novel that seriously dragged. We take so many detours into characters that aren’t central to the main plot, and they don’t serve much of a purpose—they did almost nothing to enrich the plot or the characters. They just seemed like vehicles for Lakshminarayan to do some even more unwieldy exposition for the world (like the three-paragraph-long dumps weren’t enough…). And it’s not as though the book was too short to cut some parts—my paperback edition is around 450 pages. Did we need a whole chapter about politicians negotiating with an alien species that we don’t even see afterwards? There was definitely some trimming needed. The issues with the pacing don’t end here; with all of these detours, it took away so much from the focal plot, making the development of the main characters feel rushed by comparison.

We took so much time on said detours that the romance between Saras and Serenity was rendered rushed and unbelievable. However, part of that was due to Lakshminarayan not giving them much chemistry at all from the start. I just wasn’t convinced of them being a couple, even towards the end of the book. They just didn’t seem compatible at all—and that’s not even counting some of the terrible things that Serenity does to “prank” Saraswati that realistically should’ve been dealbreakers. (Saras!! Get out of there, girl! You deserve better!) By the time they got together at the end of the novel, I was entirely unconvinced of them as a happy couple. It was just so forced from the start, like a bungled attempt at enemies-to-lovers banter.

All in all, a solid stab at a cozy space-opera, full of potent commentary and a vibrant world, but lacking in plot and some believability. 3.5 stars!

Interstellar Megachef is the first book in the Flavour Hacker series, followed by Intergalactic Feast. Lakshminarayan is also the author of The Ten Percent Thief.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!