Tag: fantasy

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

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

Posted on 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!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

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

Posted on 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!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (3/17/26) – Greenteeth

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles, and Happy St. Patrick’s Day! 🍀 Thankfully none of you can pinch me through the screen, but is a book with a bright green cover and “green” in the title enough for you?

I’ve had my eye on Greenteeth ever since it came out last year—the focus on Jenny Greenteeth and the gorgeous cover (shoutout to Leo Nickolls) caught my eye, but I’ve passed it up in favor of other books…until now. (Shoutout to the Boulder Bookstore, where I got myself a copy!) Though it had its fair share of flaws, Greenteeth was a touching, fantastical story of unlikely friendship.

Enjoy this week’s book review!

Greenteeth – Molly O’Neill

Jenny Greenteeth has lived in her lake for thousands of years. Most humans that she encounters are passing fascinations—or simply a meal. But when Temperance, a human witch sentenced to drown, comes upon her lake, Jenny decides to take her in. Temperance desperately wants to return to her family, and Jenny cannot break a promise. They decide to find a way back to Temperance’s family, but what they discover along the way may hint at a darker rift between the humans and the faerie realm—one that may lead Jenny to discover more about her monstrous lineage than ever before.

TW/CW: animal death, violence, blood, descriptions of injury, grief

For some reason, I thought that Greenteeth was going to have a sapphic element to it, but that’s fully on me constantly having the Gay Goggles on for everything. In retrospect, this might be the one time where having a queer relationship between the main characters would be a bad idea, because a) Temperance is happily married and b) Jenny’s at least 1,000 years older than her. God, that would’ve been a mess.

Greenteeth filled a void that I’ve felt in a lot of fantasy, and that’s the unabashed embrace of all of the weird parts of faerie folklore. I’ve been intrigued by Jenny Greenteeth ever since I read the incarnation of her that appeared in the Hellboy comics, and it’s safe to say that these adaptations of her are very close to the inherent weirdness of the original folklore. Said folklore of Greenteeth draws from classic British, Scottish, and Welsh folklore and Arthurian legend, both of which I indulged in. O’Neill introduces a delightful cast of characters and creatures, and makes the faerie realm feel truly weird, something that a lot of fantasy seems to miss. O’Neill’s atmospheric prose rendered this realm in vibrant color, and I loved every minute of the quest.

Jenny was obviously the heart of the story here, and O’Neill did an excellent job with her! She was just so lovable—like I said above, I love that she didn’t hold any punches with making her truly weird and monstrous. Jenny acts exactly like you’d expect a 1,000+-year-old creature that lives in the bottom of a lake and barely talks to anybody to act, which made Greenteeth a delight from the get-go. With Brackus as her foil and Temperance to teach her about the world, Jenny made for a charming protagonist. However, I’m not sure if O’Neill hinted at the reveals about her past (not the really big one—more on that later) well enough, because by the time they’d been established, it seemed out of character for her to hide something so drastically, lie about it so badly, or even convince herself that these things hadn’t happened at all; with her baby, I get not wanting to reveal that, but they were only revealed when we knew Jenny as a character who wouldn’t necessarily hide these parts of herself in the way that she did. I didn’t buy all of that, but aside from those unfortunate quirks, she was a delightful character. Plus, once we got over the hurdle of said reveals, her character arc became even more poignant.

What made Greenteeth suffer the most, I think, was the tonal shifts. Ultimately, I think it was indecisive about what kind of novel it wanted to be. A lot of reviewers have pegged this as cozy fantasy, and there are a few scenes that would lead me in that direction. However, with the rapid shifts into violence and decidedly more fast-paced and action-packed sequences, I really don’t think this fits the bill. (Also, I feel like most cozy novels wouldn’t pull the move of having a dog get stabbed unceremoniously and then completely brush over this in a few sentences. Not necessarily the dog-stabbing bit, but the fact that they basically go “Oh no! Anyway,” and move on. Justice for Cavall!) It was just so inconsistent in terms of the stakes; we only get to the real meat of the objective of the characters about halfway through. Frankly, I would’ve enjoyed Greenteeth whether or not it decided to be a more cozy, found family quest or an epic, Arthurian quest, but this novel could not decide which of the two it wanted to be. I’m not sure if the half-baked limbo between the two options was the way to go.

That being said…I could not get enough of the ending twist! Personally, it’s too good for me to spoil it, but without revealing anything big, I think it gave Jenny’s arc a deeply emotional conclusion. I’m no expert on Arthurian legend, but internally, I jumped out of my seat like a football fan when said Big Reveal got revealed. However, I think it added some oomph that Jenny’s arc was in need of; the reveals we get about Jenny’s backstory came too late and with too little preamble for the seemingly heartrending emotion that came along with them, but here, I think they reached the potential that they always needed. Jenny’s true origins gave her a real sense of purpose, and even though it was more of a symbolic gesture, it gave her proof of what she needed to hear all along: that she was a powerful, important being, full of love and the potential for greatness…as all of us are.

All in all, a heartwarming fantasy novel that faltered in parts of the plot, but blew it out of the water when it came to atmosphere and the tender relationships between its characters. 3.5 stars!

Greenteeth is a standalone, and Molly O’Neill’s debut novel. O’Neill is also the author of Nightshade and Oak, which came out this February.

Today’s song:

heard this before the Jeff Tweedy show on Friday night…

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 (3/10/26) – To Ride a Rising Storm (Nampeshiweisit, #2)

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I fully thought I reviewed the first book in this series…whoops. Did I just hallucinate writing a book review? In 10-ish years of writing book reviews, I guess it was bound to happen…

Suffice to say, I really enjoyed To Shape a Dragon’s Breath—it filled the void left by Harry Potter and rekindled my love for good old magic school YA, but without having to remember that J.K Rowling exists. To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is unabashedly Indigenous and queer, with a witty, delightful protagonist, a lovable supporting cast, and potent commentary on racism and colonization. And did I mention the dragons? Naturally, I was excited to see what the sequel had in store. And for the most part, To Ride a Rising Storm was a very rewarding sequel, full of the same heart that endeared me to book one.

Now, tread lightly! This review contains spoilers for book one, To Shape a Dragon’s Breath. If you haven’t read it and plan on doing so, you may want to skip this review.

Let’s begin, shall we?

To Ride a Rising Storm (Nampeshiweisit, #2) – Moniquill Blackgoose

Anequs has survived her first year at Kuiper Academy. Eager to return home with Theod, her only other indigenous classmate…who she may be developing feelings for. She intends to spend her summer break with her family, but what she returns home to is quite the opposite. The Anglish have begun to encroach on her homeland. Anequs is determined to assert her people’s right to govern themselves, but before she can intervene, she’s swept back to Kuiper Academy for another semester. With new friends and enemies, Anequs is determined to not let the idiosyncratic, nonsensical rules of Anglish society beat her down. But with a looming political threat mounting outside of her school, Anequs’s peace might be short-lived.

TW/CW: racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, colonialism, classism, violence, descriptions of injury

I love the Nampeshiweisit series—both books have been a delight to read. But for both books, I’ve been slightly torn about the worldbuilding. What you have to know right off the bat is that it’s not subtle, but also that it’s not trying to be subtle. Anequs and her people are Native American-coded, and the English stand-in is quite literally Anglish. You can see where we’re going here. But I wouldn’t be reading book two of this series if I wasn’t on board with it; and to be fair, the Anglish are basically a hybrid of England and a lot of Scandinavian countries in terms of their culture and folklore, even though they play the role of the English here.

However, I appreciate it more in the sense that it’s a political statement rather than a worldbuilding one—Blackgoose isn’t here to beat around the bush here when it comes to critiquing colonialism. Once you get past the names, there’s a rich fantasy world to be found here. It’s a world of dragons and secret societies and magic, and Blackgoose does an excellent job of explaining how they’re integrated into this world, and how they’ve affected geopolitics; this book gets even more into the politics of the world, which I greatly enjoyed. Plus, if you’re sick of how said magic schools have handled diversity (you all know who I’m talking about here), there’s so much diversity here, be it queer, POC, or disabled characters. And none of it feels like ticking off boxes—it all feels like how marginalized people would have lived and acted historically in a multicultural space.

One of the parts I most enjoyed about To Shape a Dragon’s Breath was Anequs herself. She’s just such a spirited and downright delightful protagonist, but one that easily holds her own against the obstacles that she faces. The Nampeshiweisit series is one that I’d recommend to readers of all ages, honestly, but especially younger readers who have just reached the age range of YA, and one of the main reasons I’d recommend it to younger readers (especially young girls) is Anequs. She’s such a good role model for young women, especially young, queer women of color: she’s determined, smart, and takes both her peers and the authorities to task for their racism and colonialism. Her personality practically bursts off the page. She isn’t without her flaws, either, and all the better—young girls are better off with role models who aren’t perfect. But so much of the draw for this series is how much I love being in her head and going on adventures with her and Kasaqua. Blackgoose really struck gold with Anequs—she’s a memorable protagonist in every way.

To Ride a Rising Storm was more character-driven than its predecessor, and for the most part, it greatly benefitted from it. For most of the novel, there’s not any hardcore, climactic action, but there are so many parts of the world and other cultures that get fleshed out that I can’t complain…mostly. (More on that later.) Either way, I loved the development of Anequs and her friends, old and new. Blackgoose’s characters are just so charming and compelling, and I loved that we got more page time with them. Jadzia was a great new addition, and I loved what she added to the friendship dynamic with Anequs, Theod, Sander, and the others. The glimpses we get of those on the margins of Anglish society outside of Kuiper Academy made the world feel even realer—there were so many pockets that we hadn’t seen before, and Blackgoose’s prose made me so much more immersed into the setting. Though some of the other parts of the book suffered from this focus, To Ride a Rising Storm felt like it was there to make the world more real.

However, there are drawbacks to having a book just for making the world feel more immersive. I’m torn about To Ride a Rising Storm because although I loved reading every second of it, there was a very clear pacing issue. While I enjoyed the more cozy, somewhat low-stakes approach that this book had, it was paced quite unevenly. We get some very serious action and stakes, but they aren’t introduced until halfway through the book. The final battle is crammed into the last 3% of the novel—I checked on my Kindle when this huge battle went down, and it started at the 97% mark! For a moment this climactic, it was introduced far too late. It just didn’t quite feel like Blackgoose quite knew whether she wanted to make this novel fully cozy or low stakes; either commit to the coziness or give the stakes more weight throughout the rest of the novel. Again, I enjoyed the pace until I didn’t—the last quarter of the novel proved that there was a serious issue with imbalance.

All in all, a worthy sequel with timely political commentary, tender friendships, and one of YA fantasy’s most memorable protagonists today. 4 stars!

To Ride a Rising Storm is the second book in the Nampeshiweisit series, preceded by To Shape a Dragon’s Breath.

Today’s song:

prepping myself to see Jeff Tweedy this friday…thanks to my dad for this one!

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 (2/17/26) – The King Must Die

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Confession time: I was not a fan of Kemi Ashing-Giwa’s debut, The Splinter in the Sky. I didn’t think I would read any of her other books. But my hunger for sci-fi knows no bounds, and when I saw this, I was intrigued enough by the premise to give her writing a second shot. Thankfully, the gamble paid off—The King Must Die was an unexpected delight, full of rebellion, blood, and the friendships that somehow spring up from those other two things.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The King Must Die – Kemi Ashing-Giwa

Newearth was once humanity’s last hope, a planet terraformed by incomprehensible, alien overlords. Now, it’s on the verge of destruction, with dwindling resources divided unfairly amongst the struggling poor and the Sovereign that rules over them. What’s more, the Sovereign has the power of the omnipotent, alien Executors on their side, willing to do their divine bidding at a moment’s notice, leaving a path of destruction in their wake. Fen, the daughter of anti-imperialist rebels, is on the run after the assassination of her fathers. With a target on her back, she flees for a neighboring rebel faction. But when Alekhai, the ruthless heir to the Sovereign, stumbles directly into the plans of the rebellion, Fen is faced with a brutal choice: join forces with him, or let the rebellion fall prey to the Sovereign.

TW/CW: murder, loss of loved ones, gore, blood, violence, descriptions of injuries, torture

I almost passed on this novel when I saw that it was by the same author as The Splinter in the Sky. But sometimes, every once in a while, it’s worth it to give an author another chance; if not for second chances, I wouldn’t have loved Grace Curtis’s Floating Hotel, for instance! I’m glad I took the chance with Kemi Ashing-Giwa, because The King Must Die was an action-packed, adrenaline-filled story of rebellion and intrigue.

My issue with The Splinter in the Sky was that the story did not feel original. A recurring thought I had while reading it was that it had poorly copied A Memory Called Empire‘s homework—there wasn’t enough about the story that was original. I can excuse some of it, since this was her debut novel, but debut novels can have a story that doesn’t border on being a rip-off. That being said, I do remember liking some of Ashing-Giwa’s prose. Thankfully, she’s worked on both of those fronts, creating an original story to go with said prose, and the prose itself has been leveled up significantly! Ashing-Giwa had such a vibrant way of describing the imagined world of Newearth and the many people within it, so much so that I could easily see myself walking through its war-torn jungles. Her dialogue is snappy without being corny, and her metaphors added a poetic flair to an often bloody and dreary landscape. The King Must Die is a marked improvement from Ashing-Giwa’s debut, fleshing out what I felt lacked in her writing on the first time around.

Whenever I say that an adult novel is a good transitory novel between YA and Adult age groups, it always seems backhanded. I guess that’s because literary circles still turn their noses up at YA for the most part. Listen—even though I’ve aged out of the target audience, I read a fair amount of YA (although adult novels have eclipsed them), I write YA, and I have a deep respect for it as an age group (it’s not a genre!). There’s a difference between YA (novels that genuinely portray the complex emotions of teenagers and their circumstances) and YA (tropey slop banking on the latest fanfiction/TV trends). And I think there’s something about The King Must Die that felt like it could be an excellent book to introduce older teens to more adult genre fiction. Sure, the kill count and amount of blood in general is very much adult, but Ashing-Giwa hits that balance between the political intrigue that’s more present in Adult novels with the character drama that I associate more with YA. It has the fast pace that I associate with some of my favorite YA sci-fi romps that I ate up in high school, but with a level of maturity that would have been lost on me at that time. It’s difficult to balance this kind of complicated worldbuilding and politics while also having this character drama, but The King Must Die had both in spades.

The main part that felt YA (affectionate) to me was the character dynamics. The dynamic between Fen and Alekhai is a classic YA setup; she’s a runaway rebel, and he’s the heir to the empire she wants to destroy. Will sparks fly? …no, evidently, but they did make for some seriously compelling character dynamics. I appreciated that, although there were multiple opportunities for Fen to be paired off with any number of characters, all of them were platonic, and they still gave me that juicy, delectable drama that’s usually only reserved for romances. Fen had such excellent chemistry with Mettan, Sinjara, and the other rebels, but what stood out the most was her relationship with Alekhai. I love a good redemption story for a villain, but it’s even more impressive given how much that Ashing-Giwa establishes about him that honestly…shouldn’t be that redeemable. But his development over the course of the story culminated in something so emotional, and the slow cracking of his shell from a ruthless, indestructible royal to someone who only wanted love in return was incredibly poignant.

The King Must Die is still sci-fi for sure, but I’d place it somewhere in the nebulous category of space fantasy. There are some elements that solidly ground it in science fiction: the alien Makers and their terraformed planet, for one, but also some of the technology. However, much of the action that we see on the ground was very fantasy, what with battles waged with intricate swords and quarterstaffs. I loved the strange, often horrifying beasts that we encounter throughout, though I would’ve liked explanations about how they fit into the ecosystems; we get a lot of tidbits of creatures that supposedly went extinct centuries ago, but are showing up for…reasons, and are never brought up again. As a whole, there were a handful of holes in the parts of the worldbuilding that didn’t relate to a) the politics or b) the terraformed Newearth, but for the most part, the world of The King Must Die was a compelling one without a doubt.

In general, I liked the ending and the epilogue; on a more technical level, Ashing-Giwa is excellent at writing battle scenes that really pump up your adrenaline. Some of the imagery, as well as Askrynath’s dialogue, reminded me of the final battle in the throne room in Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which, if you know me well, is a compliment of the highest order. Conceptually, I like how the ending and epilogue resolved—through selflessness and collective community work, the empire was dismantled and a more fair system was set up on Newearth. However, it felt wrapped up far too neatly. An empire that size—especially one with the backing of incomprehensibly all-powerful aliens—doesn’t crumble in a day. I wanted to see more of the messiness of rebuilding a new world in the ashes of the old one—the transition just felt too clean to be realistic. To be fair, The King Must Die is already pushing 500 pages, so I get it if that didn’t make the final cut. Nonetheless, it was a satisfying ending—just too satisfying for my liking, and for the tone of the story itself.

All in all, a sci-fi adventure that balanced genuine political critique with fast-paced action and dramatic, snappy dialogue—it’s rare to find a book that succeeds with both. 4 stars!

The King Must Die is a standalone, but Kemi Ashing-Giwa is also the author of The Splinter in the Sky and the novella This World Is Not Yours.

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 (2/3/26) – The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles, and happy Black History Month!

As I’ve done for the past few years, all of my reviews for the month of February will be for books by Black authors. (Stay tuned for my annual Black History Month recommendations list!) I’ve been a fan of N.K. Jemisin for many years now. I was especially blown away by her Broken Earth trilogy, and I figured I would read this to see where she started out. I liked enough of it, but strangely, the flaws reassured me—in order for you to make something as mind-bending as The Fifth Season, you have to start somewhere. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms happens to be that somewhere.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (The Inheritance Trilogy, #1) – N.K. Jemisin

Yeine Darr never imagined herself in Sky—the opulent floating city of the Arameri, who rule over countless kingdoms. After the sudden death of her mother, Yeine discovers a royal inheritance that she never knew of. Now, in the world of political machinations, scheming, and dark magic, Yeine must fight her way through kings and gods alike. But Yeine has only scratched the surface of the secrets that have been concealed from her—and their consequences may shatter all of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

TW/CW: rape, pedophilia, violence, slavery, torture, loss of loved ones, sexual content

Though she’s had some misses in her later career, N.K. Jemisin is one of the more inventive speculative fiction writers out there. The Broken Earth trilogy was so nuanced and mind-bending, and it was for sure one of the more creative adult fantasy series that I’ve ever come across. Yet somehow, even though I didn’t enjoy The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms as much as her other novels, it’s oddly comforting. You’ve got to write a weaker book before you get on the level of The Fifth Season.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a cold book. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think it works in the main character’s favor. This novel is all about isolation, alienation, and othering, and that’s exactly how it manifests in our protagonist, Yeine. Jemisin’s exploration of her being an outsider—in terms of her age, her race, and her unfamiliarity with Sky itself—centered so much about the distance that she felt between herself and the people she’s suddenly meant to cause peers. Yeine is a flawed characters, but you see the exact circumstances that make her this way; groomed to demurely accept microaggressions and be derided and tossed around, she’s shrunk herself so far into a corner that she’s ceased to be herself. Jemisin didn’t shy away from making Yeine a flawed character, but what made her at least partially worth rooting for was seeing how intricately her backstory was constructed. At best, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a no-holds-barred exploration of how being subsumed into an empire does not just to your country, but to your psyche.

Over the years, Jemisin has built a name for herself in socially conscious fantasy, and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is, without a doubt, where it all began. Though I don’t think I’ll continue with the trilogy (more on that later), this novel excelled in talking about the politics of its world. Aside from Yeine’s alienation, I loved how Jemisin showed through the worldbuilding just how much the nations of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms are willing to turn the other cheek to, be it war, racism, abuse, or slavery. It’s a dizzyingly large structure full to the brim with conniving politicians, but with the added bonus of warring gods to complicate things in Jemisin’s world. Even beyond the worldbuilding, what Jemisin does best is depict the staggering scale of an empire, and the intimidation that it causes. When the enemy seems too vast and layered to take down, it can force you into submission, or even absolute hopelessness. That hopelessness feeds into Yeine’s character arc once she’s faced with the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and her gradual conquering of it made for a poignant, timely character arc, especially for a novel written almost exactly 16 years ago.

The Broken Earth trilogy had this kind of fairytale-like narrator who stepped into the narrative to occasionally interrupt the main storyline. It was an artful, cryptic part of Jemisin’s storytelling that gave those novels a unique flavor. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was clearly the trial run of this tool, because it was…nearly the same. At first, I was excited to get that signature N.K. Jemisin storytelling, but as much as I liked it in the first half, I’m not sure if it really worked for this novel. I won’t spoil The Fifth Season, because even though it’s been out for many years now, that twist is too good to ruin for new readers; but with that narrative framing in mind, it works exactly in tandem in the story. However, for The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, it didn’t fully make sense. I did like it in the sense of a trickster narrating the story, but for the kind of fantasy this is—much more about politics than prophecy—it seemed less of a narrative device and more just window dressing to spruce up what was already there. I’m all for those kind of elements normally, but I think it works better for a destiny, prophecy-oriented fantasy like The Fifth Season more than it does the more grounded, political machinations of this novel.

One of the main things that kept me from enjoying The Hundred Thousands Kingdoms all the way was the romance. Even calling whatever happened in this novel “romance” is generous. Everything between Yeine and Nahadoth was just…weird on a number of levels. Their first sex scene was written in such a way that I fully thought that Yeine was getting raped, and their dynamic never recovered from that perception. Either way, even with Yeine being the vessel for the most powerful goddess in this universe, there was obviously an uneven power dynamic at play, but I don’t think Jemisin wrote it consciously enough. Their relationship felt the same as the relationships between the domineering, condescending politicians of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and yet somehow, it was automatically romantic for them. These kind of power dynamics are something that Jemisin has explored in her later works and written with much more nuance and aplomb; once again, I guess you have to start somewhere, because this was a mess. There could’ve been some sort of Stockholm syndrome kind of thing going on with Yeine, but once again, no nuance—even though she’s a traumatized character, depicting it through a solely romantic lens was a mistake. Additionally, the final sex scene with Yeine and Nahadoth was painfully overwritten to the point where it was almost funny. Plus, the relationship that Yeine had developed with T’vril felt much more natural and beholden to a fleshed-out romance—where did Nahadoth even come from?

Also, because I can’t let go of this—yeah, I know, Sieh is technically an adult mind in a child’s vessel (there’s a fantasy explanation for this), but in what world did that weird ass kiss between Sieh and Yeine need to happen? Reverse Poor Things, much? Eugh.

All in all, a flawed but ambitious debut from one of the cleverest fantasy authors working today. 3.25 stars.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the first novel in the Inheritance Trilogy, followed by The Broken Kingdoms and The Kingdom of Gods. N.K. Jemisin is also the author of several other sci-fi and fantasy novels for adults, including the Broken Earth trilogy (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky), the Great Cities duology (The City We Became and The World We Make), the anthology How Long ’til Black Future Month? and DC Comics’ Far Sector.

Today’s song:

saw Robyn Hitchcock on Sunday night—what an absolute treasure!!! this was a standout

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 (1/13/26) – We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles, and from the bottom of my heart, fuck ICE. Rest in power, Renee Nicole Good. My heart goes out to everybody in Minneapolis right now. ❤️‍🩹

Whoo, look at me! Actually reviewing a book not long after it came out!!

I found out about We Will Rise Again soon after it came out, and it immediately caught my eye—in fact, it seemed almost specifically engineered for me. I mean, speculative fiction based on social justice? Come on. And while the stories and essays within it varied in quality, this anthology was a worthy endeavor and a much-needed collaboration.

Enjoy this week’s review!

We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope – edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older

(description from The Storygraph:)

From genre luminaries, esteemed organizers, and exciting new voices in fiction, an anthology of stories, essays, and interviews that offer transformative visions of the future, fantastical alternate worlds, and inspiration for the social justice movements of tomorrow.

In this collection, editors Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older champion realistic, progressive social change using the speculative stories of writers across the world. Exploring topics ranging from disability justice and environmental activism to community care and collective worldbuilding, these imaginative pieces from writers such as NK Jemisin, Charlie Jane Anders, Alejandro Heredia, Sam J. Miller, Nisi Shawl, and Sabrina Vourvoulias center solidarity, empathy, hope, joy, and creativity.

Each story is grounded within a broader sociopolitical framework using essays and interviews from movement leaders, including adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha, charting the future history of protest, revolutions, and resistance with the same zeal for accuracy that speculative writers normally bring to science and technology. Using the vehicle of ambitious storytelling, We Will Rise Again offers effective tools for organizing, an unflinching interrogation of the status quo, and a blueprint for prefiguring a different world.

TW/CW: violence, transphobia, themes of oppression/marginalization, ableism, murder

Somehow, it’s so on brand that Ursula Vernon would be that hardcore about gardening. I always vaguely got that vibe from her work, but her essay was not a surprise in the slightest.

There were all kinds of speculative fiction authors featured in We Will Rise Again: familiar authors I’ve liked, familiar authors I haven’t been a fan of, and unfamiliar authors entirely; in fact, all three of the authors who edited the anthology (Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older) are all hit-or-miss authors for me, but I stuck to this anthology because the concept was so compelling to me. Sure enough, not only were their stories fascinating, so were everyone else’s. Some of my favorites were Charlie Jane Anders’s “Realer Than Real,” a meditation on being transgender in the U.S. and poking fun at gender roles, Abdulla Moaswes’s “Kifaah and the Gospel,” a potent commentary about Palestinian resistance and the inherent absurdity of colonialism, and Malka Older’s “Aversion,” an excellent commentary about how to get people to pay attention and care about issues without having to expose them to a barrage of triggering, disturbing imagery. (The latter isn’t deeply relevant at all, no way! No way…) Whether in sci-fi, fantasy, or loosely speculative formats, all of them came together in a vibrant quilt of different perspectives and ideas.

The nonfiction in We Will Rise Again was, for the most part, equally potent. I was so excited to see Nicola Griffith featured in here, and her essay “Rewriting the Old Disability Script” was as timely as ever; even though disability representation in media at large, not to mention literature, has gradually gotten better, this was a potent reminder of the staggering lack of representation of disability of any kind in mainstream media. I’d already read N.K. Jemisin’s “How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? The Toxins of Speculative Fiction, and the Antidote That Is Janelle Monae,” but it fit perfectly in this anthology and was well worth a re-read. The very core of We Will Rise Again was that the fiction stories had tangible input from activists with real-world experience; without this, I still would’ve liked these stories, but with this added layer, they strangely gave me more hope. The faith of real-world activists embedded in fiction emphasizes what this anthology was really about, for me: educated, grounded hope for a better future.

However, with an anthology that cast such a wide net idea-wise, there’s bound to be some misses. I think the biggest issue with We Will Rise Again was that it verged on being too broad. Naturally, when you’re talking about social justice, there are so many things that you can talk about, and this anthology discusses the whole gamut of them in both fiction and nonfiction, from community care to transphobia to disability rights. For the most part, I could see the common thread through all of them easily. Some of them, however, bordered on being very loosely strung together; for instance, although I loved Vernon’s essay “The Quiet Heroics of Gardening,” the connection between it and the other stories was very, very loose. I think the issue was that not all of the fiction stories had nonfiction paired with them—the format they had with most of these stories could’ve cohesively been applied to all of them and given the anthology a better, more reasonable structure.

Overall, there weren’t any stories that I didn’t like, which is a rare thing in any given collaborate short story anthology. However, I did have a structural issue with some of them. Speculative fiction is a notoriously broad term, and I think some of the stories in this collection took that a little too seriously. While some of them were clearly sci-fi, fantasy, or at least had some speculation and change to the world, some of them barely felt speculative. For instance, if you took away the fleeting fantastical element of Vida James’s “Chupacabras,” I would’ve thought that it was only set a few years after the present—there wasn’t a ton that was new about it, and said fantastical element felt like an afterthought. (I had a similar issue with Sabrina Vourvoulias’s “Persefoni in the City.”) Even with some of the “this is only meant to be a few years from now” stories, I got that what was speculative was the politics (ex. with Izzy Wasserstein’s “The Rise and Fall of Storm Bluff, Kansas”), but with the ones I mentioned, hardly anything had changed. While I get that the focus wasn’t necessarily on the worldbuilding, with the anthology’s whole point being on genre/speculative fiction as a way of collective imagination and imagining better worlds, stories like those felt at odds with the intended message. “Speculative” was a bit generous of a term for some of those stories.

All in all, a diverse and hopeful anthology, both in terms of its contributors and its subject matter, all coming together to make powerful statements about how to survive in this landscape and dream of something better. 3.75 stars!

We Will Rise Again is a standalone anthology; Karen Lord is also the author of the Cygnus Beta series (The Best of All Possible Worlds, The Galaxy Game, and The Blue and Beautiful World). Annalee Newitz is also the author of The Terraformers, Autonomous, Automatic Noodle, and The Future of Another Timeline. Malka Older is also the author of The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti series (The Mimicking of Known Successes, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, and The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses) and the Centenal Cycle (Infomocracy, Null States, and State Tectonics).

Today’s song:

LODGER 🙌

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 (12/16/25) – Katabasis

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I’ve been a fan of R.F. Kuang’s work for years (though I’ve steered away from the Poppy War trilogy, given how many people I know have been emotionally eviscerated in its wake). As bored as I am with dark academia, if there’s anybody I trust with the genre, it’s Kuang—and for the most part, her latest venture into the bowels of academia (and Hell itself) was an adventurous success!

Enjoy this week’s review!

Katabasis – R.F. Kuang

Professor Grimes is going to Hell, and it’s all Alice Law’s fault.

After a backfired spell sends their advisor to an early grave, two rival Cambridge grad students find a way to enter Hell to bring back Professor Grimes. Braving all manner of demonic horrors beyond their wildest nightmares, Alice Law and Peter Murdoch have agreed to risk it all for their beloved professor. Yet the further they travel through Hell, they must come to grips with the man Professor Grimes was—and if the man they idolized was really worth going to Hell for.

TW/CW: violence, gore, loss of loved ones, sexual assault/harassment, suicidal ideation/suicide, ableism

There’s really nobody doing it like R.F. Kuang. She isn’t my favorite author of all time, but nonetheless, I don’t think I’ll ever find another fantasy book that has both spooky scary skeletons sending shivers up my spine AND a well-placed dig at Jacques Derrida. That’s how it’s done.

Right after it was released, Katabasis seems to have made a major splash in the book community (namely BookTok)—partly because Kuang’s next novel was bound to be highly anticipated, but partly because it sparked some debate about anti-intellectualism. But compared to something like Babel, which is practically footnotes upon footnotes, I feel like this…isn’t that bad? Sure, it’s very esoteric, but most everything is so easily searchable online? Or in the library? Granted, I understood a fair amount of this solely because I took a literary theory course for my English degree, but even then…just google what you don’t know! And maybe you’ll learn something fun! I don’t know how one would go into an R.F. Kuang book and not expect something academically-minded, but maybe this is just the people who were only used to the strictly realistic fiction of Yellowface? Who knows.

Either way, the academic aspect of Katabasis was such a fun element for me. Whether or not that’s because I’m so hopelessly English-majoring it out here, but I loved all of the subtle nods to world mythologies and literature. (The bit about postmodern and poststructuralist magic cracked me UP. Poststructuralism slander healed my soul. Thanks, literary theory.) But ultimately, I loved what Kuang said about academia; there’s the satirical part that it can be Hell, but also that it demands an inhumanity of you that is systemically supported and produces such spectacular burnout. Being the genius that people like Grimes wanted required students like Alice and Peter to relinquish their humanity in pursuit of knowledge and prestige, and that’s something that you shouldn’t have to sacrifice to get what you want. Given Kuang’s accolades and track record, I’m sure she’s experienced this firsthand, but it was a potent statement on the pressure that’s put on students, especially in the Ivy Leagues and other prestigious institutions, magical or not.

Katabasis had a wild version of Hell, and so much of the fun of the book was exploring it. Granted, it is rather all over the place, but I feel like it emphasizes Kuang’s initial rule of Hell: there are no rules in Hell. There’s the parts that are just Cambridge but in Hell, carnivorous hordes of Tim Burton-esque skeletons, deities from all kinds of mythologies, and one very lucky cat. (Shoutout to Archimedes, I’m glad he survived!) Entire sections of Hell are made out of M.C. Escher’s structures, there’s impossible shapes everywhere, and all of it serves to make Alice and Peter get as close to snapping as possible—exactly what you’d expect from Hell. Tonally, it was also kind of all over the place; some of it was genuinely horrific, while other parts bordered on Beetlejuice-esque camp. But all of these disparate elements made sense as a sort of archive of all possible Hells; it’s a very academic Hell, but beyond that, it seems like an exercise in writing that Kuang had tons of fun writing. That passion poured off every page!

Alice and Peter’s relationship formed the core of the novel, and I loved following them as characters. They made such an odd couple of rivals to friends to…something more, I’d imagine, and their personalities bounced so well off of each other. The perspectives that both of them brought to Kuang’s satire of academia—Alice’s struggles as a woman of color and Peter’s as a chronically ill person—really hammered the commentary home. My main criticism of Katabasis has to do with the 75% mark (more on that later), but I feel like part of why it felt so off-balance for me was that Peter wasn’t there. Alice was a compelling character on her own, but Katabasis leaned so much on their shared dynamic, the scholarly banter they bounced off of each other and the warring struggles that eventually coalesced as they realized their dual mistake in idolizing Grimes. They had such effortless chemistry both as rivals and friends, making them easy to root for.

Of course, when you’ve created a Hell this dizzyingly intricate and complex, you’re bound to get lost. Alice and Peter did, and so did Kuang herself. There’s a point at the 75% mark where the plot, along with the characters, gets hopelessly lost. By this point, we’ve moved on past “we’re here to get Grimes,” but it seems like none of the detours served the novel in any way. The real kicker is that this part of Hell isn’t even that new or interesting—it’s even more academic commentary, which, while I liked it at first, was just repetitive and regurgitated the same satire about academia that Kuang had already talked about in the first third of the book. I’m all for taking detours to explore an unknown realm, but this one didn’t even feel new at all. My edition of Katabasis is around 540 pages, mind you, so it’s not like cutting too much of this would’ve made it too short. I feel like not every little thing about a novel directly needs to serve the plot, but I feel like it should at least develop the characters or show us something new, and this part of Katabasis did none of those things. Thank goodness we were whisked out of Hell soon after that.

All in all, an inventive and satirical journey into the depths of Hell—which, as it turns out, looks an awful lot like Cambridge. 4 stars!

Katabasis is a standalone, but R.F. Kuang is the author of several other fantasy and fiction novels, including Yellowface, Babel, and the Poppy War trilogy (The Poppy War, The Dragon Republic, and The Burning God).

Today’s song:

I just need everybody to know that this cover exists. That’s it.

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 (11/25/25) – Mad Sisters of Esi

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Guess who’s back…for only a week, probably. We’ll see. My college is on this maddening schedule that only gives us one (1) week after Thanksgiving Break and then it’s straight into finals, so I’ve been grinding for most of November. But now I’m on break, thank goodness!

I found out about Mad Sisters of Esi while doing a research paper on the history of science fiction in India. It sounded intriguing—who doesn’t love an incomprehensibly large cosmic whale, after all? I’m not usually one for fantasy (citation needed) novels that are this dense and self-referential, but there was so much passion poured into every word that I couldn’t help but be dragged along for the bizarre ride.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Mad Sisters of Esi – Tashan Mehta

Myung and Laleh are inseparable sisters living inside the Whale of Babel, a whale the size of a galaxy, large enough to contain planets in the folds of its body. They have never known life outside of the Whale, save for the Great Wisa, their distant, unknown creator. Laleh is content to explore the endless lands inside the Whale’s body, but Myung yearns for something more. Her journey takes her to the far edges of the universe, but so far that she cannot find her way back to her only home. As Myung and Laleh attempt to find their way back to each other, they ponder the stories that got them to where they were, and if stories themselves can bring them back together.

TW/CW: loss of loved ones, grief, abandonment

If you’re wondering how I’ve been lately, I’m apparently saturating myself with “[]ad Sisters” media. Mad Sisters of Esi? Bad Sisters? What am I doing here? What’s going on with all these sisters?

I’m glad that this trend doesn’t have a name, but I love the trend of recent genre fiction coming to conclusion that “maybe [x] was the friends we made along the way” can actually be a very powerful message. Maybe storytelling was the friends we made along the way. God. What a book.

I was captivated by the premise of Mad Sisters of Esi, but I could have easily not been. It falls into those fantasy books that verge more on the literary side that are very self-serious about been multilayered, dense, and Deep with a capital D. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but toeing the line between a story that’s actually meaningful and a book that’s 500+ pages of needlessly convoluted, pretentious nonsense that only serves as a monument for how supposedly complex of a plot the author could dish up. The latter are often all style and no substance, but the real frustrating part is that they’re so convinced of their substance that it deadens any meaning that it could’ve had. (See my review of The Spear Cuts Through Water. At least Simon Jimenez has other good books. Go read The Vanished Birds instead of that one.) It’s just a literary version of “look, Ma, no hands!” that rarely results in anything really substantive.

My main criticism of Mad Sisters of Esi is that it does stray into that territory sometimes. It never fully went over the edge for me, but there were moments were it got too convoluted for both my taste and the service of the narrative. Most of it was complex, but not needlessly so, but at a certain point, parts of it got dizzying. I definitely didn’t get everything about this book, and I feel like it’s almost the point. For me, what separates the two kinds of fantasy novel that I just described is…well, love. I could tell right away that Mehta didn’t write Mad Sisters of Esi to show off how complicated of a narrative that she could write—there’s a story, a tangible message, and a thrum of passion that spills through in every page. With every fictional academic article and magical town, I knew that Mehta’s world was born of love. Which, given the nature of this book’s themes, is exactly what it should have been. It’s a novel that’s all about love, storytelling, and the act of creation, and Mehta’s writing felt more than faithful to that premise.

Mad Sisters of Esi is full of meta commentary on the nature of storytelling. I’ll get more into that aspect later, but part of what sold those thematic elements was Mehta’s prose itself. Mehta is clearly someone who has studied her fair share of fairytales. Mad Sisters of Esi doesn’t just feel like a fairy tale in terms of the plot—Mehta’s prose has the same enchanting quality of a timeless fairy tale. The narrator bobs in and out, always with a cryptic lesson. The lush world is rendered in the most magical, wondrous detail. All of the descriptions surrounding Myung and Laleh make them sound like classic protagonists in an ancient tale. It was all very self-aware, but in a way that made the story feel fuller—and drew me in page by page. With Mehta’s strong hand, every location that Myung visited was bursting with bizarre, fantastical life—I was hooked on nearly every aspect.

If this novel has made me realize anything, it’s that we don’t have nearly enough cosmic whales in literature. We need more of them, frankly. Or maybe not—I’m torn on whether or not we should gatekeep them so they don’t get tired. I doubt they would, though. Either way, you can’t just promise a galaxy-sized whale full of planets and two sisters that live inside it and not deliver on that premise. Thankfully, Mehta did in spades. The world of Mad Sisters of Esi was a sight to behold. Every minute detail was somehow nonsensical and yet made perfect sense. It all felt very trippy and whimsical, and above all, so vibrant. I loved every quirk in every location that Myung visited in the vast universe; I’ve seen reviews compare it to The Phantom Tollbooth, and honestly, I have to agree—it has that same absurd, dreamlike quality more often than not. Beyond that, I love the integration of the academic articles and research papers about all of the bizarre events and people within this novel—it added such a fun layer of worldbuilding that made it all feel more grounded and real—as much as it could be, with all of the out-of-this-world (no pun intended) stuff that was going on.

With all of the emphasis on madness, I was really hoping there wasn’t going to be yet another story about art being all about suffering. From how incredible the first few chapters were, I was hopeful. But with everything about madness, madness, madness…doubt crept into my mind, for sure. I’m not confident that I fully got what Mehta intended, but I feel like this is what I took away from it. There is a little madness in every creation, even if you’re not actively suffering—how do you create a massive cosmic whale and not go a little crazy? Yet she emphasizes that even if you pour your all into your creation, that you run the risk of losing yourself, and that’s when your creation goes wrong. Mehta’s madness isn’t the suffering kind of madness—it’s about the passion. It’s about throwing all of your love into the act of creating, just so that the world is a little brighter and less boring than it was before, and to give your love a physical form. The reason that Myung is so lost out in the universe is that she strays from something that was created with nothing but love. That’s my two cents (is that expression even relevant anymore now that we don’t have pennies?), especially given how the novel concluded. That’s why the passion I felt from every page felt authentic—the passion is what it’s about, to love what you create and not destroy yourself in the process, because you too are made of love.

All in all, a dazzling and surreal space fantasy full of love, sisterhood, and whales. 4.5 stars!

Mad Sisters of Esi is a standalone, but Tashan Mehta is also the author of the novella The Liar’s Weave, and has contributed to several anthologies, including Magical Women, Solarpunk Creatures, and The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, Vol. 2.

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 (10/28/25) – Red City

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

It’s safe to say that I’ve grown up with Marie Lu in my formative years. Sure, her quality has wavered on occasion, but she’s been such a consistently talented writer and a consistent presence in my life since I was about 13 or 14. When I heard she was writing her first adult book, I was over the moon—and I’m glad to say that I devoured Red City just like I devoured her other books as a pre-teen.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Red City (The New Alchemists, #1) – Marie Lu

In Angel City, Alchemy is the backbone of the wealthy. Those who are knowledgeable in the art of alchemical transformation can perform acts once thought impossible, both through the study of magic and the consumption of sand, a drug that makes the user more perfect—at a deadly price. For Sam and Ari, childhood friends caught on the opposite sides of the criminal syndicates of Angel City, this price is one that will bring them everything that they ever wished for. But will the rift deepening between them ever be breached—and what is the price of the enmity they’ve sown between each other in their quests for power?

TW/CW: substance abuse (fantasy), torture, violence, sexual content, loss of loved ones, child abuse

Marie Lu slipping in a reference to Nannerl Mozart whenever it’s humanly possible:

I’ve been on the Marie Lu train beginning with Warcross all the way back when I was 13 or 14, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Has she had her lower points? Sure, but it’s overshadowed by her consistency overall. Even her weaker books have still been loads of fun. It feels like a wonderful, full circle moment to be reading her adult debut now, here in my twenties and nearly finished with college. Thankfully, it did not disappoint.

First off, I think Lu’s really onto something with this alchemy-based magic system…I’m fully invested in this world! A lot of what I know about alchemy (chiefly from my amazing dad, who’s taught whole classes about this—shoutout to him!) is all about transformation—not just with the kind of alchemy that was done in ancient times with physical objects and elements, but of self-transformation, whether to reach a lofty goal of immortality or of general spiritual betterment or being closer to the divine. In Red City, the premise hinges around this quality of alchemy being perverted; you can physically perform transformation-based magic of several types, but the alchemical transformation is aided by a drug called sand. Of course, in the hands of criminal syndicates around the world, it becomes a tool to become more “perfect.” Leave it to the mafia to ruin alchemy. (New elevator pitch for Red City just dropped?)

On that subject, I really like that use of alchemy as a way to critique our societal concept of perfection. Self-transformation can be an incredibly powerful thing, when you’re putting in the work to become a better, kinder, smarter, etc. person. But when the urge to become perfect consumes you to the point of becoming a shell of your former self, it eats you up from the inside. Sam and Ari both fall prey to this, and it destroys them both. Lu always has a knack for using her fantasy and sci-fi worlds to critique parts of society, whether it was the examination of otherness and marginalization in The Young Elites or the sidelining of women’s stories in The Kingdom of Back. Using the negative potentials of transformational, alchemy-based magic to critique our society’s tendency to glamorize a destructive kind of false perfection.

So of course, by virtue of this story being about wealthy people doing horrible things to stay perfect and powerful, of course it’s set in Los Angeles. (Cue “Los Ageless” by St. Vincent. There ya go, past Madeline.) Well, not really Los Angeles. This is an alternate world that Red City is set in, and the scene is set in Angel City. But Lu took such great pains to make the worldbuilding as airtight as possible, which I thoroughly enjoyed! I expected nothing less from her, honestly, given her track record. Peppered with everything from fictional textbooks to congressional testimonies to FDA announcements, Lu left no stone unturned when it came to finding out how alchemy magic would affect the world. Even with the real-world basis to go off of, it seemed effortless for her to integrate alchemy and have the world still feel so real. I was immersed from page one, and there wasn’t a hole to be found throughout.

Making the jump from YA to Adult is harder than a lot of authors make it seem, but Marie Lu did it with ease with Red City! I feel like a lot of authors make the switch not considering how different the characters’ voices and choices will be, even with an age difference of only 5-10 years from the teenagers were once writing. I’ve read quite a few adult books from normally YA authors where the protagonists still read like teenagers. Lu made it look easy. It’s much more mature for sure, but never strays into edgelord torturefest territory either just to seem more “adult”; the violence, complexity, and sexual content are dialed up, but in a way that felt realistic for the characters, their circumstances, and the stakes. (And for the record, the way she wrote sex scenes was effortless and never got cringy, thank goodness! If I remember correctly, The Midnight Star got pretty steamy in some places, so I’m not surprised, but it’s worth commending.)

As always, Marie Lu’s characters are the star of the show in Red City. Man, she can craft such compelling characters! She just keeps winning!! Sam and Ari were both unlikable in some capacity, but they felt like tragic heroes to me. They were both doomed from the start (and I’m assuming they’ll get even more doomed as the series goes on…yippee!), but Lu wove them both like tapestries, and their stories hooked me from the start. My only nitpick is that Sam seemed to get disproportionately more development than Ari, but I’m assuming that’s what the mysterious book 2 is setting up. What we have now is excellent—Sam and Ari were both such compelling, tragic protagonists, and the way that their quests for power, recognition, and perfection tore them apart was nothing short of breathtaking. MARIE LU HAS DONE IT AGAIN!

All in all, a dark and dazzling addition to Marie Lu’s expansive fantasy canon that you won’t want to miss. 4.25 stars!

Red City is the first novel in the New Alchemists series, though no information has been released about its sequels or how long the series will be. Lu is also the author of many series for young adults, including the Legend series (Legend, Prodigy, Champion, and Rebel), the Warcross duology (Warcross and Wildcard), the Young Elites trilogy (The Young Elites, The Rose Society, and The Midnight Star), the Skyhunter duology (Skyhunter and Steelstriker), the Stars & Smoke duology (Stars & Smoke and Icon & Inferno), the standalone novel The Kingdom of Back, and the DC Comics tie-in Batman: Nightwalker.

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!