Category: Book Review Tuesday

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Book Review Tuesday (6/10/25) – When the Tides Held the Moon

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I found this novel in an Instagram post about upcoming queer releases in 2025, and this one immediately caught my eye. You put a comparison to The Shape of Water in the tagline, and you bet I’m in. (If anything, it’s right between The Shape of Water and Nightmare Alley, given the setting.) Venessa Vida Kelley has delivered a vibrant and sensitive story of queer love and solidarity amongst weirdos.

Enjoy this week’s review!

When the Tides Held the Moon – Venessa Vida Kelley

Orphaned and far from his homeland of Puerto Rico, Benny Caldera makes a living as an ironworker in 1910’s New York City, barely scraping together enough to stay afloat and out of reach of the taunts of his white coworkers. But when Sam Morgan, the owner of a sideshow, notices his handiwork, he commissions a strange project for him: a tank whose contents are unknown to him. Benny takes the opportunity for a new job, and finds an unexpected family in the sideshow’s performers. He soon finds out that the tank holds an impossible marvel: a captured merman. As Benny gains the merman’s trust, he finds himself drawn to him—and the merman to him. But when Morgan’s abuse to the merman turns deadly and the sideshow begins to crumble, it’s up to Benny to hatch a plan to save them all.

TW/CW: racism, homophobia, abuse (emotional and physical), violence, blood, ableism, xenophobia, mentions of sexual assault (off-page)

art by Venessa Vida Kelley

I may be a somewhat critical consumer, but listen…you dangle a comparison to The Shape of Water in front of me like a carrot, and goddamnit, I’m eating it right up. God forbid that a weird girlie such as myself consume even more media about found family, fish people, and the nature of marginalization!! That being said, nothing comes close to The Shape of Water, but that’s not the book’s fault. When the Tides Held the Moon is a beautiful novel in all of its parts.

When the Tides Held the Moon boasts a vibrant cast of characters, and it really felt like a feat for Kelley to balance all of them and still give them unique and complementary personalities. Besides Benny and Río, the cast is mostly rounded out by the fellow performers in the sideshow, of which there are many. Yet out of the nine (I think?) primary side characters, none of them ever felt like an afterthought. Each of them were not only rounded out, but had such thoughtfully planned interactions with all of the other characters—sometimes clashing, and sometimes meshing perfectly. There were individual romances and special friendships between the nine of them, but they were a shining example of found family done well. Despite their individual differences, their solidarity and kinship shone through on the page, making for a narrative that had no shortage of tenderness and heart.

The romance between Benny and Río shone in When the Tides Held the Moon. There was such a tenderness to both of them that gave the novel so much of its heart. I’m always a sucker for narratives about two outsiders falling in love, but I love the ways that their separate senses of outsiderness intertwined; they shared music, stories, and tales of their respective homelands. The slow burn romance was paced well, and never felt rushed. I do feel like the ending was a tad bit too close to The Shape of Water, without spoiling anything, but I think their individual way of solidifying their romantic relationship at the end of the novel separated itself enough in the end, making for a resonant, vibrant end to the novel and to their respective arcs. It was all just so wonderfully sweet, but never in a way that felt insincere or cloying—I just loved them!

When the Tides Held the Moon is an incredibly diverse novel, which was exactly how it should’ve been; even without nearly as much knowledge as Kelley has (this was a very well-researched novel and it shows), it would’ve been a disservice to show either New York City or the culture of sideshows as places that don’t have a history of diversity. Immigrants from many different countries (Puerto Rico, Ireland, India, and Russia to name a few) are at the forefront, as well as lots of queer people, disabled people, people of color, and people who overlap within these intersections. However, some novels have a tendency to have a very 21st century view of all of these things. When the Tides Held the Moon felt very historically sensitive in terms of the language it used around these characters, but not in a way that was sanitized. In fact, it didn’t hold back from depicting the kinds of horrific oppression that these characters faced. Yet it wasn’t straight-up trauma porn either—it was honest about the struggles marginalized people faced during this time period, but never in a way that felt like their trauma was being exploited for emotion. That emotion shone through naturally in the interactions that the characters had and the solidarity they fostered in the face of mutual oppression.

That being said, the major thing keeping When the Tides Held the Moon was some of the writing, particularly the dialogue writing. Even from someone with a fairly high tolerance for bombastic, dramatic dialogue (I love Ray Bradbury and the Claremont run of X-Men for similar reasons, if that gives you a good idea of where I’m at), Kelley’s dialogue often bordered on too much. As sensitive and nuanced as everything else about this novel was, the dialogue trended towards excessively cheesy and overdramatic more often than not. Though I adored Río as a character, his voice very much fell into that overly verbose, “wise”-sounding dialogue that you could slap on any fantasy character. Benny in particular had some of that pathetic “aw, gee, mister, gimme a break, why don’tcha” kind of overwritten voice that was in-character at best but almost grating at worst. The side characters had varying degrees of this affliction, but none of them necessarily jump out at me save for the very stereotypically New York mobsters (“he’ll be sleepin’ with the fishes,” etc…wait, there was SUCH a missed opportunity them to say that). The only exception I can think of was Matthias since it was established that it was his genuine personality and not a consequence of the writing. If this were any other novel, I would’ve tolerated this much less, but Kelley’s story had so much heart that I could partially let it slide…but not all the way.

All in all, a beautiful, sensitive novel about love and marginalization with a big heart. 4 stars!

When the Tides Held the Moon is a standalone and Kelley’s debut novel. She is also the author of the forthcoming graphic novel Manu Faces the Music, which is set to be released in 2026.

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!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (6/3/25) – The Death I Gave Him

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Here’s a continuation of my recent sci-fi mood…I’ve been looking to add more sci-fi to my TBR, because I seem to exhaust my supply faster than I can keep up. The premise of The Death I Gave Him being a queer, sci-fi/thriller retelling of Hamlet enticed me, but sadly, this novel didn’t deliver—not on the retelling front, and not entirely on the thriller part either.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Death I Gave Him – Em X. Liu

Hayden Lichfield is intent on carrying out the mission that his father is pioneering—the Sisyphus Formula, a substance that could one day reverse death itself. Enticed by immortality and down on his luck, Hayden throws himself into his work. But when his father is found murdered in Elsinore Labs, Hayden has no idea who to turn to—and who wanted to murder the man who wanted to beat death. Trapped in his room with only his AI, Horatio, to trust, Hayden scrambles for answers, and everyone around him is a suspect. But is it not just Hayden’s friends, but his father that have been lying to him all along?

TW/CW: murder, blood, descriptions of injury, suicidal ideation, grief, death of a parent

Trying to describe whether or not The Death I Gave Him qualifies as a retelling feels like the Ship of Theseus. If all of your characters’ names allude to Hamlet and you set your story in Denmark, but not much else relates to Hamlet, is it still a Hamlet retelling? How much Hamlet does one need to remove for it to still feel like a retelling? Sadly, Em X. Liu is proof that there is a limit to how much you can remove before it stops feeling like a retelling. It’s Hamlet in name only.

Having read Hamlet less than a year ago, I went into The Death I Gave Him with a fairly fresh memory. However, if not for the more obvious name changes (Hamlet becomes Hayden, Polonius becomes Paul, etc.) and the fact that it’s set in Denmark, I really wouldn’t have thought that this was a Hamlet retelling. I’m fine with loose retellings, but I don’t think it should’ve been billed as such. The whole Denmark setting definitely felt like very a “see? This is Hamlet, I promise!” move and wasn’t relevant to the plot whatsoever. I’m fine with loose retellings, but I feel like the similarities end with what I just described above. I’m not sure if this even qualifies as a retelling so much as people named after characters in Hamlet. Also, none of these people were nearly crazy enough to be in a Hamlet retelling. You’ve got to have someone go at least a little insane to have a proper Hamlet retelling. Hayden got a wee bit depressed and existential towards the end, but there wasn’t nearly enough “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” insanity to make it feel like a true tribute to Shakespeare. It just felt like a rather emotionally stunted novel even though it’s based off of something so dramatic. Some tonal liberties are inevitable for any given adaptation, but these ones just didn’t feel true to Hamlet, which made the more obvious Hamlet references feel more like preventative measures to make sure that people remembered that this was a Hamlet retelling.

Having mixed formats (interview excerpts, security camera footage, etc.) can be a great tool to add some additional context—and a unique flavor—to a novel, and I think it works especially well with thrillers, which The Death I Gave Him partially was. However, I don’t think Liu properly executed this format. Granted, it’s difficult to pull off, but when it’s executed well, it adds another layer of mystery to what is hopefully another layer of mystery. The problem Liu seemed to have is that, with the exception of the security camera footage, all of the other perspectives sounded exactly the same. All of the interviews, document excerpts, and “fictional” interludes by Horatio were in the same tense and the same POV, which basically rendered the format useless. Beyond that, these interviews and whatnot were from multiple people, but they all had virtually the same narrative voice. By the end of the novel, it didn’t even matter where the excerpts were coming from—they all sounded the same. If you’re going to pull off this kind of format, you have to make each component sound unique—if everything sounds the same, what’s the point in specifying which chapter is an interview and which one is a fictional account?

Also, none of the characters seemed to have much of a purpose outside of being props, aside from Hayden, Horatio, and maybe Felicia if I’ve being generous. Even though we get a significant portion of the novel through her interviews and written segments, I never even got a specific read on her voice since it was so similar to every other character’s. Paul, Rasmussen, and Charles were just there until they conveniently weren’t. The timeless fun of Hamlet comes from seeing everybody scheming against each other and different motives clashing against each other, but everybody was just rendered into very similar characters with too similar motives to each other for the mystery to really be worth it.

The same was true of the plot. I was committed to The Death I Gave Him because I was excited by the premise and wanted to see how the plot unfolded. I will say that Liu did a great job of setting the scene and cramming us in said locked room of this locked-room mystery. However, very little happened in said locked room—other than a handful of scattered moments, the place was quite slow, and the ratio of information that was revealed to the amount of pages it correlated to was way off—it felt like we only got significant revelations every 100 pages, and The Death I Gave Him is a little over 300 pages. There needed to be much more intrigue and complicating factors and clashing motives for this novel to work as a mystery; what we had was quite lackluster.

All in all, a sci-fi retelling of Hamlet that missed the mark on its source material and its new plot. 2 stars.

The Death I Gave Him is a standalone, but Em X. Liu is also the author of the novella If Found, Return to Hell and several short stories in various anthologies and magazines.

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!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/27/25) – Light Years from Home

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I’ve had several of Mike Chen’s novels floating around my TBR for quite some time. I’d forgotten that I’d read a short story of his in From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back, and I figured I’d give his novel-length writing a try. Plus, I was just in a sci-fi mood (as I always am). Despite the flaws that dragged down the premise, Light Years from Home was an ambitious novel that blended genres and didn’t shy away from being messy. Whether it successfully cleaned up its messes, however, is up for debate.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Light Years from Home – Mike Chen

15 years ago, the Shao family was thrown into disarray. Jakob, the only son, and their father disappeared. Their father later returned, dazed, disoriented, and convinced that he and Jakob were abducted by aliens. He died soon after.

Jakob has been missing for over a decade now. Sisters Evie and Kass haven’t spoken since the incident, with Evie diving into alien conspiracy theories and Kass throws herself into her work and caring for their aging mother. But when Jakob returns, parroting their late father’s theories about alien abduction, the sisters have no choice to bury the hatchet and reunite. As Jakob’s story grows wilder and the rift between the sisters widens, they must contend with the possibility that all of this may be true—but can Jakob be trusted? And if his story is true, what does it mean for the fate of Earth?

TW/CW: death of a parent, grief, dementia themes, substance abuse (smoking, drinking)

In the acknowledgments, Mike Chen says that this story was initially inspired by “Red” by Belly, and I’m tempted to give it another half a star just because I’ve never heard anyone outside of my immediate family or Pitchfork talk about them. The title also makes me think of The Rolling Stones’ “2000 Light Years from Home,” but that’s a vague enough title that it could be a reference to a lot of things. Although Belly didn’t save every flaw, Light Years from Home is a solid meld of science fiction and realistic fiction.

Light Years from Home has one of the most compelling beginnings of a book that I’ve read recently. You’re thrown right into the action aboard a Seven Bells spaceship in a classic space opera setting. Jakob cradles his alien comrade in his arms as they die, and thus begins his perilous quest back to Earth. But the reader and Jakob are the only people who know about this—the only other character who did (their dad) is notably dead. It would’ve been easy to just have the characters not believe him, but Jakob is already established as an unreliable person—his real life experience sounds suspiciously like an outrageous lie he would’ve told in his college days, which gives the characters both more obstacles to overcome, but more of their messy family dynamic to dissect. In terms of plot, Light Years from Home was a great study in not taking the easy way out—everything was messy and tangled, making for a book that had lots of drama and hurdles to pick apart.

Every single member of the Shao member was on the obnoxious, insufferable side (save for maybe Evie), but Chen did a great job of capturing the complicated family dynamic in the novel. Fifteen years after Jakob’s abduction, the wounds remain raw, and not a single member of the family has recovered from the fallout. Although I wasn’t satisfied at all with the character development of…well, any of the family (I’ll get to that later), Chen did an excellent job of weaving together all of the contrasting beliefs, motivations, and traumas that each family member had. All of them dealt with Jakob and their dad’s disappearance and death, respectively, in wildly different ways, and their coping mechanisms butted heads over the course of the novel. Even though this was ultimately handled poorly at the end, I did also appreciate the sensitive depiction of their mom’s dementia; Chen did a very respectful job of depicting the emotional impact of her memory loss and not being able to recognize her own children.

For all of the focus on the messy Shao family, the promised character development that their dynamic hinged on was not delivered on. There should’ve been plenty of conflict with Jakob reckoning with the man he was on Earth versus the man he was while serving in space with the Seven Bells, yet none of that happened. All of his character development happened off-page, resulting in a character that came off more flatly than I think was intended. Likewise, Kass and Evie were set up for significant development, but nothing happened with them either. Evie’s beliefs were reinforced and she and stayed static throughout the novel, not giving up her fantasies of aliens for the sake of the family. The closest Kass got, if you could call “okay, I guess aliens do exist” character development, was a brief revelation that even though she’s a therapist, that she doesn’t know everything about herself or her family, and that she shouldn’t pretend to know everything. That last half of my sentence amounted to about a paragraph around 50 pages before the novel ended, and it felt like entirely too little too soon. In the end, the character development was a jumble of unfulfilled promises—we got the shells of what could’ve been nuanced characters, but despite the bizarre journey they went on, they came out the exact same as they were before.

Also…I’m sorry, what the hell was that ending? Somehow, it was one of the most anticlimactic parts of the whole novel, and weird in ways that didn’t make sense. Jakob returns to the Seven Bells, but there’s hardly any fanfare or even extended moments of grief from the sisters, even though their brother has just decided to spend the rest of his life in space and never see them again. There wasn’t nearly enough emotion to it, and nor was there page time—this moment only gets around 4-6 pages tops. Instead of an emotional resolution with her daughters, the mom somehow un-dementias herself and remembers everything, and is also eerily content with her only son’s decision to spend the rest of his life in space. It all just felt so rushed and emotionally stunted compared to the rest of the novel, and not nearly as detailed as it needed to be. Weird is the only way to adequately describe it. I felt lost, but also robbed of what could’ve been something so bittersweet. I feel like it’s partially a side effect of none of the characters having any character development, but it felt like such a lack of a resolution. It was practically a non-ending.

All in all, a sci-fi/realistic fiction blend that embraced messiness in both plot and character, but had significant trouble with cleaning it up. 3.5 stars!

Light Years from Home is a standalone, but Mike Chen is the author of several novels. He has contributed short stories to From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and the full-length novel Brotherhood to the Star Wars universe. He is also the author of We Could Be Heroes, Vampire Weekend, Here and Now and Then, A Quantum Love Story, and many more novels for adults.

Today’s song:

NEW MARY IN THE JUNKYARD WOOOOOOOOOOO

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/20/25) – Rebel Skies

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Update: I do have something nice to say, so I’ll say something. Beyond the heinous Studio Ghibli AI trend (and if anybody here thought that was “cute,” even when the White House twitter did it, get thee away from this blog), people tend to narrow Studio Ghibli down to a very shallow, cutesy aesthetic that discounts the heart of Hayao Miyazaki’s incredible visions. Rebel Skies was one of the few pieces of media inspired by Miyazaki that clearly gets him—rich worldbuilding with whimsy and darkness in equal measure. Yet even if you take that comparison away, Rebel Skies is a YA book to be reckoned with, full of heart, spirit, and skyships.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Rebel Skies (Rebel Skies, #1) – Ann Sei Lin

In the Sky Cities, no one is more revered—and feared—more than Crafters: those who possess the power to draw magic from paper and make creatures come to life. Kurara, a young servant aboard a flying ship, has barely honed her powers, only using them for party tricks. But when her best friend, Haru, is revealed to be a Shinigami—a creature made of paper—and grievously injured, Kurara flees to a skyship in order to find answers. There, she hones her Crafting with Himura, an ornery Crafter with secrets of her own. As she gets to know the motley crew of her ship, Kurara discovers that Haru’s identity isn’t the only secret that’s been kept from her—and that there are enough to bring down the Empire.

TW/CW: fire, animal death, torture, death, descriptions of injury

Ann Sei Lin seems to know as well as anyone that we need a bit more whimsy in YA fantasy. The edgelord stuff has gotten boring. It’s fantasy, come on now! I get that if magic was the norm, people might not be impressed by it, but there has to be some wonder in your life, right?

First off, the worldbuilding was tons of fun! Though the Studio Ghibli-inspired elements are plentiful, if I had to summarize the world of Rebel Skies, it wouldn’t be with that. If anything, it’s more of a steampunk version of Kubo and the Two Strings. You’ve got Nausicaä-esque airships and floating cities (which both felt very Philip Reeve as well) combined with paper-based magic, and all of the possibilities you can think of along with it—paper animals, paper people, and monstrous paper beasts. (Oh, and the paper animals can talk. Gotta toss some talking animals in there.) I’m not usually one for steampunk, but this isn’t your garden-variety “slap gears and tiny hats on everything in Victorian England and call it a day” steampunk—not only is the world inspired by Asian cultures (mainly Japan), the blend of magic and machinery married easily, and often whimsically. Though the colors I imagined trended towards rusty and earth-toned, Lin couldn’t have made her world more vibrant—and multilayered; not only were there base-level divisions between the people who lived on the ground and the people who lived in the sky, there were all sorts of customs, stereotypes, and quirks that were given to each, which in turn influenced how all the mismatched patchwork of characters interacted with each other.

For me, it doesn’t get much better than the worldbuilding informing the themes of the book. Not only did I love all of the intricacies of the paper magic in Rebel Skies, I love how Lin used it to explore the theme of autonomy, and especially the lack of it. Kurara herself has been ordered around as a servant, and she sees the same thing being done to the magical beings around her; she sees how Himura treats Akane, his shikigami fox, and questions whether or not he’s really so content to devote his entire existence to serving Himura. Add that to the visceral trauma of discovering that her best friend is made of paper and has been seemingly puppeteered from afar, and the reigning empire is performing cruel experiments on its shikigami, and Kurara’s ultimate motive to both her personal journey and her journey to wrong the rights of her world lies in autonomy, and having a reciprocal, ethical relationship to her magic. It’s an excellent metaphor and an excellent addition of nuance to the worldbuilding—if the world relies on unbalanced relationships, how can I shift them so as not to do to others what others have done to me?

You all know by now how much of a sucker I am for a good found family story, and while Rebel Skies didn’t completely fulfill that promise, I love the group dynamic between all of the characters. Even though the subplot of Sayo and Kurara warming up to each other felt a bit rote, I liked the progression that their characters had. Kurara and the rest of the pirates were lots of fun, and they gave the skyship a lively, lived-in feel. I’m also a sucker for the trope of older, gruff characters taking excitable younger characters under their wing; Himura was a solid addition to the canon, but I feel like he’s hiding too much to truly be a mentor to Kurara. I’m interested to see where it goes in Rebel Fire, but my gut says that it’s going to be some kind of subversion. We’ll see. Either way, Rebel Skies’ motley crew lived up to its description, making the setting all the more lively and adventurous.

As someone who read voraciously in my childhood and longed for some kind of bridge between middle grade and the too-broad age range of YA (12 to 18 is so arbitrary and baffling, you’ll not hear the end of it from me), Rebel Skies automatically won me over. It’s categorized as YA, but it feels right in the middle of MG whimsy and adventure and more YA stakes and themes. Kurara, even as a teenager, has a childlike sense of wonder, and although some of her interactions came off as slightly more childish than her age, it hits a charming balance of innocence and discovery that feels like the ideal bridge between the age jump between the two categories. As a longtime YA reader, it hits a natural sweet spot, but in its balance of darker, more YA elements with the same kind of voice as older MG, Lin has written a book that could serve as both a younger YA reader’s introduction to the genre and an easy pleaser for the YA reader.

That being said, the one major flaw in Rebel Skies is that I didn’t see why Himura’s POV was necessary. He was a solid character, but this novel was clearly Kurara’s story. I enjoyed hearing his voice and Lin wrote it well, but I don’t think his input to the story served a purpose other than giving his side of events…that we’d already been shown through Kurara’s POV. We get that Kurara’s been slow in her training, and then Himura repeats it as such. We do get plot information that we wouldn’t have otherwise gotten from Kurara, but if that’s the only reason that Himura gets his own chapters, then what’s the point? There could be multiple interesting ways for Kurara to get this information that could deepen or complicate the relationship she has with Himura—she could overhear a conversation or sneak a look at some of his documents, for instance, and he could catch her in the act, adding more conflict to the plot. Again, he was a perfectly fine character, but aside from the interludes, Rebel Skies wasn’t meant to be a dual-POV novel. It’s the Kurara show, c’mon!

Overall, a memorable fantasy book with lush worldbuilding, a lively cast of characters, and a unique voice that balances middle grade adventurousness with the more matured nuance of YA. 4 stars!

Rebel Skies is the first book in the Rebel Skies trilogy, followed by Rebel Fire and Rebel Dawn. Rebel Skies is Ann Sei Lin’s debut novel.

Today’s song:

I’m totally new to BCNR, but I saw them open for St. Vincent the other night, and they were great performers!! this was probably my favorite of theirs.

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/13/25) – The Knockout

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I always feel bad whenever I come back after period of hibernation only to come back with a negative review. I just have to get it all out sometimes! I’ll probably have something nice to say by next week.

Say it with me, kids: just because a book has diverse representation doesn’t erase the flaws in its writing! Sadly, The Knockout was not the one-two punch that the title promised: it tried to hard to sound hip and teenager-y, and nosedived spectacularly.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Knockout – S.A. Patel

Kareena Thakkar knows her power. She’s been building up her skills in Muay Thai, and she’s good enough to qualify for the US Muay Thai Open—an event that could take her to the Olympics if she wins. But even though it’s where her passion lies, Kareena is divided between her Muay Thai world, her peers’ desires for her to be traditionally feminine and act the way a good Indian girl should. With her ill father and the Olympics on the line—as well as a cute boy, Kareena must decide which world she’d rather stay in—or if she needs to divide those worlds after all.

TW/CW: bullying, terminal illness, misogyny, medical content

Look. I read YA frequently, knowing that it’s a market of books about teenagers mostly written by adults. Even by that standard, I haven’t read a book so deeply how do you do, fellow kids? as The Knockout in some time. I wanted to badly to root for Kareena, but her insufferable voice—and by extension, Patel’s writing—made it a real ordeal.

Kareena’s voice was the most glaring issue that The Knockout had. Firstly, she didn’t sound or act like a 17-year-old. If anything, between her language and her maturity, she sounded closer to 13 or 14. The kind of stiff, teen movie comebacks she doled out to her bullies were nowhere near the kind of experience a person would have at 17—especially someone who had been through as many struggles as her. In my experience, what you need to do when writing teenagers (or any character who’s younger than you) is to emphasize how you (or your peers) remember feeling—what you’d prioritize, what was important to you, how you would react to situations, etc. Writing like a teenager is about the emotion, because there are a lot of them running around your brain at that age. Sure, it’s hard to nail the voice, and granted, I don’t have the age distance from Kareena that Patel has. But there’s lots of easy ways to not do it, and some of those are a) extensively leaning on what you think is “hip” slang, and b) automatically skewing the character’s voices as young as possible within the teenage range. Between the unnecessary censorship of cursing here and there and her childish outbursts, Kareena was not believably 17. Additionally, Patel’s insistence at integrating what she thought to be “current” Gen Z slang was painfully bad. If anything, it dated The Knockout leagues more than making it relevant. It’s not the teenage experience, but instead the teenage movie experience, simply parroting what adults think teenagers sound like. It positions itself as current and relatable while never encapsulating what it was like to be a teenager, making what should’ve been the heart of the novel hollow.

As with Kareena’s supposed 17 years of age, I was never convinced of the stakes in The Knockout. When Patel established how good Kareena was at Muay Thai, all it did was make Kareena feel unnecessarily overpowered. I normally only say that about fantasy or sci-fi novels, but she was just too good to the point that every fight she did seemed to be a fleeting moment of struggle before she absolutely pummels her opponent. This continued throughout the duration of the novel. Even though Kareena had the Olympics on the line, I never once got the sense that this was hard for her. Her training seemed to be the only time she struggled—other than that, she just flew through the US Muay Thai open without a problem. If she actually experienced tangible setbacks within her practice or the Muay Thai open, I would’ve been more motivated to root for her. Yet everything seemed to be handed to her on a platter, making the stakes feel almost nonexistent. I knew from the start that Kareena would get everything that she wanted, and while I appreciate the value of having diverse characters succeeding in their narratives, it made for a book with no stakes.

Bullying is a major plot point in The Knockout, but I don’t think that Patel succeeded in making all of it completely believable. As far as Kareena getting bullied by her other Indian-American peers for not being “Indian” enough went, that was one of the few parts of the book that was successful; unlike the main plot, it gave Kareena’s struggles some tangible weight. However, I wasn’t fully convinced that her doing Muay Thai was something so outrageous that she thinks that she’ll be bullied by the whole school for it. I get that it’s not a traditionally feminine sport, but with the way that Kareena talked about Muay Thai, you would think that she’s coming out of the closet. Even with the cliched interactions between Kareena and her peers, I just couldn’t imagine her being bullied for it, and not just because if someone were to slam her into a locker, teen movie-style, she’d slam right back. Kareena being a Muay Thai champion didn’t feel nearly as dirty as a secret as Patel lead us to believe, which made some of the novel’s more personal stakes less believable as well.

Additionally, I have mixed feelings about the romance between Kareena and Amit. It didn’t fully sidetrack the book for me, but I wasn’t fully invested either. I did like that Amit was instrumental in helping Kareena reconnect with parts of her Indian culture, but I don’t think he had much of a personality beyond what he did for Kareena. They seemed to have almost all the same interests, and Amit didn’t have anything to distinguish himself other than not doing Muay Thai. He was just a blank slate with similarities to Kareena baked in so that there could be some instant “chemistry” between the two of them. The only tension in the romance was when Kareena met his more traditional family, so the tension didn’t even lie with him—it was all outside factors that threatened the integrity of the relationship. The only differences I can really think of about Amit and Kareena is that he comes from a more traditional family and he’s…well, a different gender. That’s it. He wasn’t a person, he was just a boyfriend. I do think that this kind of story is good with a romantic subplot, especially considering that it’s YA realistic fiction, but like almost everything else in The Knockout, I could not get invested whatsoever.

That being said, I do have some positives for the book. I’ve seen a lot of books, especially YA ones, where the main character has to choose between their traditional culture and the more “appealing” American culture. The Knockout, by contrast, had Kareena be raised by two parents who weren’t connected to their culture in a conventional way—they were flexible with letting their daughter be who she wanted to be without sacrificing their Indian heritage in the process. Kareena was disconnected from her roots in some ways (which she begins to remedy in this novel), but both she and her parents emphasize that there’s no single way to be Indian. I can’t speak to any cultural accuracies, of course, but I loved this as a message for a YA book in this context—there’s no one way to be any identity, be it in terms of gender, ethnicity, race, or anything else. Paired with the expectations of femininity that society puts on Kareena, it’s a wonderful message. I also really liked that Kareena had a combination of multiple interests that weren’t traditionally feminine—in addition to Muay Thai, she’s also passionate about computer science. Sadly, all this was overshadowed by the flaws in most of the novel, but if you took all that away, at least The Knockout has something beneficial to say. I just wish it was said in a less cliched, more authentic way.

All in all, a book with a positive message if you soldiered through it, but was bogged down by childish dialogue writing and characters (even by YA standards) and a lack of all-around believability. 2 stars.

The Knockout is a standalone. She is also the author of several books for teens and adults, including Isha, Unscripted, The Design of Us, First Love, Take Two, The Trouble With Hating You, Sleepless in Dubai, My Sister’s Big Fat Indian Wedding, and the Venom series (A Drop of Venom and A Touch of Blood).

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!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (4/15/25) – Afrotistic

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

April is Autism Acceptance Month, and although I probably won’t have time to make a whole post about it (blame finals), I figured I would review a book with an autistic protagonist and an autistic author! This one’s been on my TBR for a few years, but I was only able to find a copy more recently. Although it wasn’t perfect, it’s a great book to introduce a younger audience to autistic issues, especially from a more diverse perspective.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Afrotistic – Kala Allen Omeiza

15-year-old Noa Ohunene Jenkins doesn’t know where she fits in—or if she can fit in at all. All of her life, she’s never felt Black enough or autistic enough. And now that she’s moving to a new high school, she doesn’t know if she’ll fit into either communities—much less her new school. Noa has her mind set on one thing: a place in the Dean’s Merit Society. The problem is, the only way she’ll get in is if she has leadership experience. Scrambling for answers, she decides to gather up fellow autistic teenagers and forms a group to discuss autistic issues. But will it be enough to show her peers and teachers that she’s just as worthy of praise?

TW/CW: ableism, racism, bullying, mentions of suicide (past), brief mentions of police brutality (in reference to police violence towards autistic people)

Afrotistic has been languishing on my TBR for way too long, but even though it wasn’t a perfect book, I think it’s a great book to introduce people—especially kids and young adults—to autism, ableism, and the intersection of race and disability! It’s already difficult to find neurodivergent representation in literature, but rarer within that category is autistic people of color—for that alone, Afrotistic is such an important book.

For some reason, I misremembered Afrotistic as being middle grade. Who knows why. I kept that assumption going in, and then I of course found out that Noa is 15 years old and a sophomore in high school. Whoops. That being said, going in with that mindset wasn’t all that bad, because I really feel like Afrotistic hits that sweet spot between middle grade and YA that’s so often unexplored. It appeals to a mid-teens age range because of its protagonist, but the writing is accessible enough that I feel like kids as young as 12 or 13 could comfortably read and relate to Noa and the other characters. (The fact that 12-18 is such a huge range of maturity for a single age group is whole can of worms, so I’ll save it for another time.) There are some more mature and sensitive topics that are briefly discussed (police brutality against autistic people of color, for one), but it’s brief enough that I feel like that age range could process and learn from it. Neurodivergent representation is hard to find in books aimed at all ages, and I feel Omeiza’s accessible writing style, as well as the relatability of Noa as a protagonist, makes for a book that could teach tons of pre-teens and young adults alike about Black and autistic identity.

Another reason I’m glad that Afrotistic exists is because of the intersectionality! The primary focus is on Noa’s identity as a young, Black, autistic girl, and how she’s struggled to make her voice heard because of how little attention is paid to neurodivergent (and disabled in general) people of color. Both through the essay excerpts in the story and through her real-time experiences not being believed by her peers and teachers, it was a poignant narrative about how neurodivergent people of color have to fight even harder to have their needs met and understood. Going off of that, I appreciated that within the Roaring Pebbles, there was a lot of intersectionality as well; as well as all of them being autistic, there was a mixed-race character with cerebral palsy, as well as men and women being present.

That being said, I wasn’t as charmed by the characters as the characters themselves seemed to be. I loved Noa and was rooting for her throughout the story, but I found myself less compelled by some of the other characters. It was clear that the friendship between Noa and Brayden was supposed to be one of the core friendships in the novel, but I really didn’t feel any kind of friendship chemistry between them. All Brayden seemed to do was make jokes that didn’t land and make awfully pushy remarks to Noa joining his youth group. I get that Noa is also Christian and doesn’t necessarily mind, but I feel like even if I was also Christian and I had somebody trying to get me to join their youth group that persistently, I’d snap. The issue with most of the other characters is that they were rather underdeveloped; this was inevitable with the amount of characters that were focused on in the Roaring Pebbles, but even the ones that had more page time were boiled down to one or two traits at most. I get that it’s difficult to juggle that many characters, but even the ones that were relatively more in the spotlight weren’t given enough traits to make them stand out. Going back to the whole pushy youth group thing with Brayden, I found it hard to believe that every single member of the Roaring Pebbles were completely fine with their group being filtered through said youth group and having a name with biblical inspiration. I get that if you’re strapped for resources, any venue you can have to gather is essential, but I would imagine that at least one of these characters isn’t Christian…

Additionally, what also soured me to some of these characters was the random side plots that weighed the story down. There’s a whole, completely unnecessary thread of two of the boys in Roaring Pebbles fighting over a girl that gets entirely too much page time and only served to derail the plot. About half of the conflicts that occur throughout Afrotistic felt of this nature—some of them were natural (like the inevitable issue that some of the autistic people have different triggers, which was something I appreciated being included and discussed), but others felt like filler. Here’s the issue: Afrotistic is only about 250 pages (on my Kindle edition), so there could have been so many more opportunities to discuss more aspects of Noa’s friendships, identity, or even her home life. Instead, we got problems that were solved far too quickly and didn’t contribute anything to the plot.

Also: I’m not completely sure how to feel about this, but I had to mention it. At some point, when Noa is surveying the different cliques in the lunchroom, she labels two of them the “woke kids” and the “cool woke kids.” It was…odd, to say the least? I can kind of see it as being a factor of her not feeling autistic/Black enough for those crowds, but I’ve never once heard cliques described as “woke” unless it’s some weird, insecure conservative person. I guess I’m so used to seeing “woke” being lobbed at anything vaguely liberal (or considerate of basic human decency) these days, but Afrotistic was published in 2022, and the same was true then. I’m just not sure how I feel about that.

All in all, a timely novel that deftly highlights the issues that autistic people of color face, but stumbled in terms of its characters and frequent plot digressions. 3.5 stars!

Afrotistic is a standalone novel, but Kala Allen Omeiza is also the author of Autistic and Black: Our Experiences of Growth, Progress, and Empowerment, and The Worst Saturday Ever.

Today’s song:

SO glad I found this song!! Brian Eno never gets old

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (4/8/25) – You Sexy Thing

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I’ll skip the prologue about how predictable it is that I picked up another queer space opera, and one with a ’70s music reference in the title at that. (SING IT WITH ME!! 🎶I BE-LIEVE IN MIRACLES—🎶) Nonetheless, I kept my expectations low, and I’m glad I did. Hilarious, heartbreaking, and heartwarming all at once, You Sexy Thing is the start of a true joy of a space opera trilogy!

Enjoy this week’s review!

You Sexy Thing – Cat Rambo

It’s been decades since Niko Larson and her fellow soldiers were able to break free of the Grand Military of the Hive Mind, where they were voiceless pawns in a never-ending war. Now, they run the Last Chance, a humble restaurant at the edge of TwiceFar Station, serving customers from all over the galaxy and from all walks of life. But when a mysterious, sentient ship destroys their livelihood before giving them a mysterious mission that they can’t refuse, Niko and her fellow chefs and restaurateurs must return to the fray they tried so desperately to escape—all with the heir to the Paxian Empire in tow.

TW/CW: sexual content, violence, blood, torture, kidnapping/imprisonment, war themes, abuse, genocide themes, death

The entire time I was reading this book, I’d click on the Kindle cover and I’d immediately start hearing “You Sexy Thing.” It just kept coming back, like I was trapped in a sitcom gag with a signature musical cue. Probably the intended effect. Not complaining, though. Absolute banger.

What an excellent space opera this was! You Sexy Thing scratched so many of my favorite sci-fi itches, and one of the biggest ones was the aliens and creatures! CREATURES! CREATURES! I’d place You Sexy Thing as bordering on space fantasy, though I won’t go into a whole digression on what counts/doesn’t count as sci-fi or SF; that was mainly because of the ghosts, some magic use, and were-creatures. However, Rambo did an excellent job with all of the alien denizens of this galaxy! There was a fantastic balance of humanoid and more unfamiliar creatures, all of whom were delightful. Skidoo was a personal favorite, as I’m particularly fond of any kind of cephalopod-inspired aliens, but Petalia, even if their name was rather on-the-nose (in line with a lot of the humor of the book), had some fascinating details about their culture and plant-based physiology. Also, there’s a chimp. Gotta have a chimp to round out the crew, amirite? Thankfully, this one doesn’t go the way of Nope, and Gio is a perfectly reasonable individual. There’s also lots of casual queerness abound, which is always a plus.

Another thing I love in space opera is a good motley crew, and You Sexy Thing had a stellar one! Rambo’s choice (apparently a challenge from fellow sci-fi author Ann Leckie, if the epigraph is anything to go by) to have You Sexy Thing in an omniscient, third-person POV was a great solution for covering the thoughts of all of the characters, discarding the need for separate chapters for everyone. All of them had distinct and lovable (mostly) personalities that made them butt heads with some characters and mesh with others, while still retaining a sense of familial bonding. Even outside of the restaurant setting, they retained a hilarious rapport that was a joy to read. Dabry’s musings on cooking were a delight, Atlanta’s trouble fitting in with the crew made for some lovely interactions, and Niko’s continuous struggles to face her past made for some of the novel’s most emotional points. You Sexy Thing balanced levity with emotional weight to great effect, and had a fantastic cast of characters to split the difference.

Amidst all of the humor, You Sexy Thing explores some quite complex, nuanced emotion, which I appreciated. I don’t think Rambo fully explored the implications of everything that had been done to Petalia, and how returning to Niko’s company affected them, but what we got was appropriately complicated, messy, and painful to read—exactly how it should have been, given the circumstances. This story never strays away from the cross-cultural complications of relationships, grief, and more, which added to how fleshed-out and unique all of the characters felt. By the end, all of the betrayals were appropriately punches to the gut, but ones that were cushioned by the found family dynamic that had been built up by the end.

Like the characters, the worldbuilding was an absolute treat! I will say, some of it was rather scattershot—we frequently get references to alien species and places that don’t even show up after they’re mentioned, but since this is a trilogy, I might be able to get past that, assuming that they come up later. I’m mostly accepting it, knowing that a) this is a huge galaxy, and b) that the world will presumably be expanded upon. It only really peeved me when they failed to explain much about what said alien races looked like. Other than that, Rambo’s worldbuilding was fascinating to pick apart! Sometimes, individual concepts are more interesting than the whole, and that aspect was made manifest by many of Rambo’s concepts, from married couples (or friends) being able to meld into a single being to the biotechnology that made You Sexy Thing (the sentient ship) possible. Through it all, I got the sense that Rambo’s galaxy was a distinctly lived-in one, which made my reading experience all the better.

My only real complaint, if any, was Tubal Last. You Sexy Thing had moments of being purposely cheesy, from the in-your-face ’70s music references to the on-the-nose character names; the latter felt like a nice, tongue-in-cheek reference to some of the characteristics of older sci-fi. That quality extended to the villain, who was cartoonishly evil. I don’t necessarily mind a comically evil villain every now and then, but in contrast to the complexity and nuance of many of the characters, Tubal Last felt out of place, just another obstacle (a formidable one, but a very one-note one) for the crew to overcome. He was over-the-top, but not in a way that necessarily served the story, other than some slightly unique motivations.

Overall, You Sexy Thing was a blast from start to finish, with a lively, energetic galaxy and a cast of lovable characters and daring hijinks to fill it with. 4.5 stars!

You Sexy Thing is the first book in Cat Rambo’s Disco Space Opera series, followed by Devil’s Gun and Rumor Has It. They are also the author of Neither Here Nor There, the Tabat Quartet (Beasts of Tabat, Hearts of Tabat, and Exiles of Tabat), And the Last Trump Shall Sound (with Harry Turtledove and James Morrow), and many other full-length works and short stories. Rambo is also the former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

Today’s song:

it’s taken me this long to finally listen to Jimmy’s Show all the way through…preparing for Jimmy’s Show 2? either way, it’s an absolute delight.

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (4/1/25) – Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Now, for a book I absolutely LOATHED…

…gotcha. Get Fool’d. 🫵

Here we are in April, and I’ve turned a hard left from reviewing cozy (to varying degrees) fantasy for two weeks straight to one of the most brutal novels I’ve read all year. Ladies, gentlemen, and others: Suzanne Collins. Sunrise on the Reaping did exactly what it was supposed to: it pulled no punches, and yet it also had a message that’s critical to how we move through these times.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games. #0.5) – Suzanne Collins

Haymitch Abernathy knows his fate is sealed the minute he’s reaped for the 50th Hunger Games, the second Quarter Quell where twice as many tributes are chosen to pay the price for losing a bygone rebellion. All Haymitch ever wanted was a quiet life, tucked away in District 12 with his family and Lenore Dove, the girl he loves. As he’s carted off to the Capitol, he knows that he has the chance to end the cruelty that the Capitol has gotten away with for decades. With a handful of unlikely allies, Haymitch plans to end the Hunger Games once and for all. But has he estimated just how far the Capitol will go to secure its grip on Panem—or have they underestimated his tenacity?

TW/CW: graphic violence/blood, murder, gore, descriptions of injury, poisoning, animal attack/death, loss of loved ones, death of children, fire

WARNING: this review contains some spoilers! If you haven’t yet read Sunrise on the Reaping, tread lightly.

Sunrise on the Reaping was precisely as brutal as it should have been. Suzanne Collins did not hold back. I had to sit in silence after finishing it…the only shred of levity I could find was remembering that Philip Seymour Hoffman played Plutarch Heavensbee in the movies and imagining his character from The Big Lebowski in his place. [uncomfortable laughter] “That’s marvelous…”

24 years before The Hunger Games, the Capitol that we were introduced to rules with a similarly iron fist. One of the most chilling aspects of Sunrise on the Reaping was how Collins showed even more of the sinister inner workings of what the Capitol was doing to keep the Districts in line. The manipulation of both Louella and her brainwashed body double was one of the most chilling—I knew both of them were doomed from the start, and it made the reach of the Capitol all the more frightening. But perhaps the most horrifying was the Capitol reaping Beetee’s barely teenage son as punishment. What stands out about Collins’ worldbuilding is how much she focuses on the human cost; aside from the obvious, she’s adept at showing the lack of regard the Capitol has for marginalized lives, and that dehumanization forms the core of what makes the Capitol so oppressive: profiting and dealing in death.

In particular, I loved how Suzanne Collins portrayed a middle-aged President Snow. He’s as chilling as he is in the original trilogy—ruthless, heartless, but above all, laser-focused on having everything under his control, whether it’s the citizens of the Capitol or the many tributes stepping out of line. His brief interaction with Haymitch revealed so much about his character. Sure, the whole reference to the “Snow lands on top” motto from The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes did feel like Collins blatantly going wink-wink, nudge-nudge, you can clap now to the reader, but the rest of his character revealed just how far he’ll go to dictate the entirety of his environment. It was honestly so funny how incel-y he was in regards to projecting all of his relationship woes from 40 years ago onto Haymitch’s girlfriend (all while he’s recovering from being poisoned, gotta admire the dedication), but it just goes to show that even in his weakest moments, Snow will always rue the things that slipped through his fingers—and do anything in his power to prevent it from happening again.

This aspect is something that’s fairly present in the first two Hunger Games novels, but I like that the Hunger Games themselves never take up much of the book. Collins knows that if she were to make every book solely about the Hunger Games, they would be feeding into the very same spectacle that she’s commenting on. It’s never about the spectacle—it’s the senseless brutality becoming the spectacle. (Also, it all comes back to the people in the fandom who go “now I want to see every single Hunger Games” and don’t realize…) In the case of Sunrise on the Reaping, it gives the effect of how quickly Haymitch has to process everything (and the fact that he can’t process it), but also that the pressure is constricting him more than it ever has, which heightens so much of the emotion. The main draw of the book, for many people, becomes not the focal point, but the point where Haymitch is put to the test—not the entire plot.

That’s not to say that Sunrise on the Reaping was flawless. As much sympathy as I had for Haymitch, his narrative voice got on my nerves for the first half of the novel. Collins played up that sort of overly earnest, country bumpkin style of speaking, making him more of a caricature than a person for a good third of the novel. I supposed it functioned more to show how easily innocence and ignorance can be destroyed in the face of revelations about how the world works, but it didn’t work for me because Haymitch knew about the cruelty of the Capitol firsthand. On principle, it was a shaky way to build his character. He almost seemed too good, even though he was so willing to break the rules and spit in the face of the Capitol. Again, the contrast between him both post-Quarter Quell and his older self is appropriately drastic, but I think I could’ve done without the setup. Plus, it just got so annoying hearing call everyone “sweetheart” and give candy to smiling children constantly. We get it…salt of the earth, etc., etc. I just couldn’t believe that Haymitch was truly pure. Collins never shied away from Katniss not being as such—why not Haymitch?

I already knew how Sunrise on the Reaping was going to end. I’d remembered the few details that Collins had alluded to and had gotten transferred to a fan wiki. It’s a given going into a Hunger Games novel that you operate on the prospect that everyone’s doomed. It would have been so easy for Collins to let that speak for itself, to not put any effort in and rely solely on the inevitability that the fans were going to be devastated anyway. But Collins, as always, gives such a depth to every character, making every slight the Capitol makes that much crueler. You know that Haymitch’s life is upended after he wins the Hunger Games, but Collins gave him a drive, a life, and stakes beyond what we see in the original trilogy, that makes his losses so much more painful. One of Suzanne Collins’ best qualities as a writer is that she toes the line between giving characters unexpected nuance and sympathy, but never outright excusing their actions. She’s a cartographer of personality, however rocky.

I saw the message of Sunrise on the Reaping coming a mile away, and to be honest, I didn’t even care. I knew how Haymitch’s games ended. From the moment he started plotting to destroy the arena and end the Hunger Games for good, I knew his mission would end in failure. But as with every successive Hunger Games novel that Collins writes, there’s a critical message to be found, and this one rings true in these times more than ever. We know that Haymitch fails, but because the rest of the trilogy exists, we know that his dream takes flight—just not when he wanted it to. Resistance and rebellion, even when they fail at first, are always worth fighting for, no matter how difficult the path towards peace is. No matter how much Haymitch failed, he was critical in exposing the cracks in the Capitol’s system—and he helped bring it down in the end, even though he failed in his first try. No matter how long it takes, resistance is always worth it, even if you don’t get to see its immediate effects.

Overall, a raw, brutal, and deeply emotional installation in the Hunger Games universe. 4.25 stars!

Sunrise on the Reaping is one of two prequels set in the Hunger Games universe, preceded by The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The main trilogy is comprised of The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay. Collins is also the author of many other books for children, including the Underland Chronicles, Year of the Jungle, and When Charlie McButton Lost Power.

Today’s song:

Forever is a Feeling was a slight disappointment, to be honest, but this song ROCKS

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (3/25/25) – Water Moon

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Even with me being slightly less online than I’ve been in the past few years, I’ve seen a lot of buzz about Water Moon. Enough that it warranted a hardcover copy that was a whole $31 at Barnes & Noble…not even a special edition or anything, just a regular copy. Nevertheless, I wanted to give it a less expensive try, so I got it on hold at the library. Though it didn’t live up to both the $31 or the Studio Ghibli comparisons it warranted, Water Moon was a heartfelt, if a little confused, about the connectivity of people and the choices that lead us to the places we end up.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Water Moon – Samantha Sotto Yambao

Hana Ishikawa is set to receive a very unique inheritance. Her father has given her control over his old shop in Tokyo; tourists and passersby will see a ramen restaurant, but once you look inside, you find that its wares are something completely different: a pawnshop where you can exchange your life’s regrets and unpleasant choices. But on her first day on the job, Hana finds the shop destroyed. Looking for answers, she instead finds Keishin, an American tourist searching for answers of his own. Their search leads them into a strange realm of magic and wonder that may hold the keys to the problems they’re facing…and more.

TW/CW: loss of loved ones, grief, abandonment, mentions of abortion/pregnancy issues (brief), blood/violence, descriptions of injury

Water Moon was a good stab at magical realism; it had some beautiful elements that had me enraptured, but not for long enough. Its fundamental issue is that it wanted to do too much but didn’t have the space to do it. What we have here, messy as it was, at least read well and presented some moments of lovely, whimsical magical realism.

While this novel had some issues throughout with thematic cohesiveness, I do think that the central one (or the one that felt like it was supposed to be central, at least), was a beautiful one—connectivity through the choices we make. Hana’s life is dictated by regret, but she learns, through jumping through fantastical worlds, that it’s the unexpected things in life that bring us together that make life worth living. I especially loved the connection to the Super-Kamiokande Neutrino Detector, something that Keishin has returned to Japan to study—capturing the secrets of this elusive, subatomic particle that can only be observed (if you’re lucky) in an observatory filled with distilled water underground. I’m a sucker for when writers are able to articulate that emotion with science, especially with something as misunderstood as physics; Water Moon did a lovely job of using that as part of the larger metaphor about how lucky we are to experience the unexpected, and how that can bring us together. I just wished Yambao had done more with it, but what we had, I loved.

I also loved the worldbuilding in Water Moon! I don’t think the childlike wonder that Yambao was going for was properly executed all the way, but I love the inherent whimsy that’s integral to holding the worldbuilding together. You travel to these parallel, unseeable worlds found in puddles on the ground, and in those worlds, you find everything from villages dedicated to hanging the stars at night and origami and paper planes with a life of their own. Even with the rather sinister undercurrent that runs through it, the glimpses of the fantasy worlds were almost dreamlike. They had a distinct quality of feeling like the kinds of fantasies you imagined when you were a kid (especially the puddle travel), which enhanced the feel of the world overall.

However, that whimsy only came off in varying degrees. That was due to the writing, which often came off rather rote. Yambao presented the reader with a myriad of fantastical, objectively wondrous elements in this parallel world that Hana and Keishin venture into, only to describe it in the flattest terms. For a magical realism novel, the writing felt almost utilitarian, designed to describe a setting or a phenomenon with the absolute minimum amount of description for the reader to get an idea of what it looked like. Sure, Water Moon didn’t need to be excessively flowery or purple in its prose, but when you have a setting as whimsical and magical as this, more description is necessary.

The same applies to the feelings of the characters—they hardly seemed to react to their settings, only serving to be chess pieces that were dragged around at will when the plot called for it. Keishin at least had something of a personality, but other than him, most of the characters, including Hana, were defined only by what had happened to them. They were defined only by their backstories, and that dictated everything that they did throughout the story—not their motivations or their personalities. All of this, combined with Yambao’s relatively flat writing, made their romance lackluster. Not only did it feel like the classic “oh, our main characters are a boy and a girl, therefore they have to fall in love,” it was just so rushed and un-earned—we didn’t get nearly enough development (or page time) from either of them to merit a full-blown romance. Even though they’d jumped through magical puddles together and visited whimsical worlds, I found myself barely caring for either of them, or their romance.

Back to the subject of themes…I wholly believe that a book shouldn’t be constrained by talking only about one theme. In fact, most every book does that anyway—having a book centered around a single theme without even a handful of sub-themes or topics is practically impossible. Like I (and Yambao) said, everything is connected. Water Moon, however, had a problem with articulating it. Beyond the bit about choices and connectivity, Water Moon wanted to say so much about so many things—motherhood, grief, regret, parent-child relationships—and yet it didn’t know what to say about any of them. A theme was introduced with the same emotional weight as the central theme, it got 50 pages of page time, and then it barely resolved itself. Water Moon had almost no sense of direction, leaving me with a book that didn’t resolve itself in a satisfying or logical way. Ultimately, this felt like a case of too many cooks in the kitchen—it was an ambitious attempt to tackle every theme and give it the same weight, but it ended up in a plot (and characters) that ran around confused for almost all 374 pages and underbaked statements on what it wanted to say.

Overall, an ambitious and dreamlike novel with a world that was a treat to explore, but offered up flat characters and had no sense of what it wanted to do with itself. 3.5 stars!

Water Moon is a standalone, but Samantha Sotto Yambao is also the author of Before Ever After, Love and Gravity, A Dream of Trees, and The Beginning of Always (under the name Samantha Sotto).

Today’s song:

so hauntingly beautiful :,)

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (3/18/25) – The Teller of Small Fortunes

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

You know it. You know I’m all for cozy literature. I wasn’t particularly in a moment where I needed cozy fantasy, but these days, I love to space them into my regular reading rotation to keep things lighter, if need be. I’m usually more for sci-fi than fantasy, but I love a good fantasy every once in a while. The Teller of Small Fortunes wasn’t the best cozy fantasy I’ve read, but like a mug of tea, it was great for a momentary hug of warmth and love.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Teller of Small Fortunes – Julie Leong

Tao is an immigrant from Shinara, making a living far to the west in Eshtera. She makes a living off of fortune-telling, but hers are not like the grand tales that people expect from those with Shinn heritage. But Tao’s fortunes have a catch: they are small fortunes, minor events that seemingly have no consequence, but will add up towards a life of crucial choices. She cannot stay for long in one place, lest these fortunes pile up and her customers start to expect more complex predictions. But when she crosses paths with an ex-mercenary and a thief-turned-poet on the road, Tao has to keep a promise to the fortune she gave them: they’re looking for a missing girl, and Tao knows that she’ll be reunited with them. What’s unknown, however, is how it’ll happen…

TW/CW (from Julie Leong): political conflict, death of a parent, parental neglect, racism, grief, alcohol

While The Teller of Small Fortunes wasn’t the best cozy fantasy I’ve ever read, if you’re looking for something sweet to tide you over, look no further! In the mood for found family, cats, spells, and wonky pastries? I’ve got just the book for you.

Given the crowds that I hang around with, it might surprise you that I’ve never actually played DnD. I’ve always been adjacent to people who are into it and frequently play it, but I’ve never played myself. By osmosis, I know enough about it to discern that anyone who loves DnD will absolutely eat up The Teller of Small Fortunes! Somebody with more DnD knowledge could probably sort each character into a class, but I’m illiterate in that department; yet even still, I can tell that it came about in the way that many DnD campaigns seem to: out of love and out of friendship. Leong’s cozy fantasy has the perfect balance of wholesomeness, levity, and more serious themes, and overall, it’s an ode to the friends we find in unexpected places. The contrasting personalities of Tao, Mash, Silt, and Kina made for a delightful found family with goals that often got in the way of each other, but twisted to form a journey across a fantastical land that taught them lessons about identity, friendship, and individuality. It’s just so sweet. Admittedly, it did border on a bit cloying at times (even for me, both with my cozy fiction proclivities and my merciless sweet tooth), but overall, cozy fantasy fans will be more than satisfied. Plus, there’s a cat. Automatic win in my book.

Tao’s character arc and the themes around it were the heart of The Teller of Small Fortunes. This novel focuses heavily on her immigrant identity, but it explored something that I haven’t often seen with these narratives. In order to make a living outside of her home country, Tao has to perform a stereotype—in her case, being a seer. She relies on this preconceived notion of her people all being able to see the future, and knows that she’ll be able to make money off of it, yet she tries so hard to make it define her. On the other side of the coin, there’s the Guild of Mages, who physically want to use her as a pawn, fitting her into their similarly superficial stereotype of what a magic-user should be. Yes, The Teller of Small Fortunes is very much a “be yourself” narrative (I will always hate Disney for making people trivialize this kind of message), but it’s one that’s complicated by the nuance of the aspects of Tao’s identity. For her, being herself is a lifelong fight, held up by several systemic forces of oppression. Her journey is a mental one just as much as it is physical, and it required the same labor, with a satisfying conclusion: the conscious effort by her to not let other people box her in.

However, the writing sometimes got on my nerves. For me, cozy fantasy can sometimes fall into the trap of being almost condescending in its writing style; it veers to strongly into the “and what did we learn today, kids?” kind of storytelling, even if it’s often aimed at adults. There is a marked difference between having a low-stakes plot and dumbing down the language for your audience. The Teller of Small Fortunes didn’t completely fall into making the language overly digestible, but every plot point and side quest (of which there are many) tended to have a very clear, obviously stated lesson that accompanied the ending. Even if said plot points were well-executed—which they often were, especially the scene with the phoenix egg—their impact was often lessened by the regurgitating of what the scene was meant to mean for the characters and the message, as if we couldn’t figure it out. I honestly didn’t mind that these plot points, especially the ending, were wrapped up in notably kind, easier ways—that’s almost a staple of cozy fiction, at this point—but we didn’t have to get their message shoved in our faces on a neon sign. Additionally, as a character, Kina also erred on this side of saccharine—she was sweet in the way that some cozy fiction characters are, but like the pastries she made, it got a little too sweet in a grating way.

I also found the worldbuilding to be quite generic. The Teller of Small Fortunes was one of those fantasy novels that took existing countries, copied and pasted them into the narrative, and added magic and mythical creatures; Shinara was clearly an analogue for China, which, while it was great for the themes of anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia, didn’t make for worldbuilding that was interesting or novel in any way. The same can be said for most of the other places that Tao and the gang pass through—most of them fell under the “vaguely European, I will not elaborate” curse that plagues high fantasy, and the only things that distinguished them, if any, were some of the exports/trades that they had. I will say that I loved the system of the Guild of Mages, and they served as great commentary for tokenization and a distant but tangible source of corruption in the world, but they didn’t have enough of a presence for them to have an effect on the world for me. It all felt very lackluster to me in contrast to the care that was put into the characters. I also would’ve liked more clarification on the regional magic. It’s implied through some of Tao’s background that magic is often associated with/endemic to particular regions (hence the stereotypes of Shinn people being seers/fortune tellers and whatnot), but we don’t get a clarification of whether or not the rule also applies to the surrounding regions.

Overall, a cozy fantasy that had lovely, poignant characters and themes, but was less fortunate in the worldbuilding department. 3.5 stars!

The Teller of Small Fortunes is a standalone and Julie Leong’s debut. Her next novel, The Keeper of Magical Things, is a companion novel set in the same universe as The Teller of Small Fortunes, and is slated for release in October 2025.

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!