Tag: LGBTQ+

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🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️The Bookish Mutant’s Books for Pride Month (2024 Edition) 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Wednesday, bibliophiles!

Here in the U.S., June is Pride Month! And every month, I find myself having a downer of an introduction, just because the world only gets kinder to queer people in the smallest increments, it seems. The vocal minority in this country are still bent on erasing all evidence that queer people exist in the first place, like an offending stain on a white tablecloth. (A note to homophobes: has it ever occurred to you that you don’t have to look at pride flags or queer couples? You can just look away and not make it anybody else’s problem…life is so short, man.) But our community is one characterized by resilience: no amount of book bans, culture wars, or bigotry will wipe us off the map. We are are here, we have always been here, and we will always be here. Nothing you do will make us disappear. Don’t let the vocal minority distract you from the beauty created and progress made by our community.

So once again, here’s a list of YA and Adult books with queer characters and themes, curated by your local bisexual. I also added the specific representation of each book.

Just a refresher on my key:

MC: Main character

LI: Love interest

SC: Side character(s)

For my previous lists, see below:

Enjoy these book recs!

🌈THE BOOKISH MUTANT’S BOOKS FOR PRIDE MONTH (2024 EDITION)🌈

FANTASY

SCIENCE FICTION

REALISTIC FICTION:

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

Today’s song:

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (6/11/24) – Junker Seven

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles! I’m back from vacation, and I’m feeling rested—and ready to review one of the books I read on my trip.

Junker Seven hung around on my TBR for about a year, and I ended up buying it on Kindle for my trip; as I’ve said ad nauseam, queer sci-fi is the stuff of life for me, so I’ll always lap it up when given the chance. Although I wish the worldbuilding (and the politics) were more creative, it was a solid tale of of love and the joy in reminding yourself that your existence is an act of resistance.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Junker Seven (Twin Suns duology, #1) – Olive J. Kelley

Castor Quasar makes a solitary but dangerous living as a junker, ferrying scrap—and fugitives—across the galaxy. They prefer to stay out of the business of others, whether that’s the widespread political unrest throughout the galaxy or simply making friends. But when Castor is offered a job with an exorbitant amount of money, they can’t help but be suspicious, even though the offer would mean valuable repairs for their ship—and an easier living. Their cargo is Juno Marcus, a trans activist with a target on her back and an urgent need to escape before the Intergalactic Peace Force finds her. Castor reluctantly agrees, but they soon find themself in over their head—and head over heels in love…

TW/CW: murder, loss of loved ones, transphobia, deadnaming, misgendering, ableism, police brutality

Junker Seven was by no means without its flaws, but if you’re looking for a love letter to trans love and identity, a slow-burn romance, and resistance in space, then you’ve come to the right place! Not my favorite, but this was a good book to start off pride month—unabashedly queer and political.

Structurally, there were a lot of odd worldbuilding choices (I’ll get to that later), but despite that, the world of Junker Seven felt wonderfully lived-in. The quiet moments where Castor was alone on their ship were what convinced me of this world being tangible; not everything is sleek, clean, and untouched. You never get the sense that the ship is cramped just because it was made so, but because of all of the choices that led Castor to the place they are today. It’s not just a plot device vehicle—it’s got special nooks and crannies that have been shifted over the years, and there’s a goldfish that’s been there through it all, Castor’s only constant companion. Details like this, as well as some of the pockets of resistance that Castor and Juno find throughout their journey, added a real human element to the story. Even with only two characters for most of the novel, Kelley did an excellent job of making the galaxy seem like a tangible place where humans have settled—and brought their unique ways into a new, far-future world.

If you’re looking for representation, especially trans representation, then you’re in the right place—Junker Seven has diversity in spades! Both the main character and the love interest are trans, as well as several side characters, and Castor is also disabled—they have burn scars, a prosthetic leg, and autism! The key part of said representation is that it never felt like a checklist; if the acknowledgements are any indication, Kelley’s goal was to create a resonant story of trans joy, love, and resistance, and though I’m not trans (disabled and queer, though), that love shone through; Junker Seven felt like a love letter to trans resistance all the way through, from Castor and Juno’s slowburn romance to Castor’s gradual radicalization. I love how the disability representation was handled as well! All of the details about Castor’s autism affects their job felt authentic as a neurodivergent person; no stone was left unturned, whether it was how wearing their prosthetic affected their sensory issues to how it affected their relationships. It’s clear from every page that the diversity in this novel wasn’t borne out of a need to tick off every possible marginalization—it was borne of a need to put authentic queer, trans, and disabled stories out into the world.

That being said, the worldbuilding of Junker Seven gets stranger the more I think about it. There are enough pockets that could convince you that, yes, this could be hard sci-fi that had some thought put into it, but the actual worldbuilding ends at the descriptions of the climates of the planets that Castor and Juno are hopping to and from. Other than that, the politics are the main focus, but given how political this book is, I was surprised at how unoriginal it was in terms of the evolution of politics and queer resistance. Junker Seven is set several hundred years from now, and yet the politics are all but copied and pasted from the U.S. politics of today—no changes whatsoever, save for being stricter when it comes to the treatment of trans people in particular. Yes, history does tend to repeat itself in terms of treatment of the marginalized, but it’s never in the exact same way twice; technology changes, rhetoric changes, leadership changes. None of that is reflected in Junker Seven; honestly, it was familiar to such a degree that it would have worked more if it were set in a less futuristic dystopia set on Earth. This story is set so far in the future that minimal changes in language and policy just makes no sense. It would have been so much more potent—and creative, frankly—to see how the adapted technology of the future actually factored into how trans people in this universe were being oppressed. There were a few throwaway mentions of more advanced technology that was being used to surveil trans people, but that was about the extent that anything changed. It all boiled down to unused potential—there were so many opportunities to explore how (possible) aspects like advancing technology, increased policing, and advancements in genetic modification could affect the status of trans people throughout the galaxy. And yet, Kelley chose to change almost nothing about our current political climate and paste it into space—to the detriment of my suspension of disbelief. Oppression of marginalized groups remains the same in its goals, but not necessarily in its methods—those change with the times.

What also suspended my disbelief was how little we knew about Marwood save for that he was horrible. Save for being a Trump stand-in, we knew almost nothing about him, save for that a) he’s evil (Trump), b) there’s a widespread news network that’s basically his mouthpiece that he uses to demonize trans people (Fox News), and c) did I mention? He’s evil. I will give Kelley some credit for at least establishing the Zephyr News aspect and the fact that his nepotistic predecessor both ended presidential term limits and instated Marwood in a corrupt, illegitimate election so that his fascist, ultra-conservative values would live on. That, at least, felt like a reasonable enough start for a villainous character, but that was it. The key word here is start. I wouldn’t say it completely falls into the dystopian trope of “we’re not going to say anything about the government, but you have to understand. They’re BAD, guys. BAD,” but it comes rather close. This circles back to my overarching issue of unoriginal worldbuilding, but I wanted to know what separated Marwood from any other run-of-the-mill fascist—did he come from a celebrity background and had no real political experience, like Reagan or Trump, or was he a more cold and calculating type with political prowess who knows exactly how to undo any kind of progress and twist the laws in order to abuse his power? A successful, frightening villain needs to be more than an evil cardboard standup that lurks in the shadows, and we never got more than fragments to show that Marwood was more than a stand-in fascist to move the plot along. (Also, did the entire galaxy, after blending into an almost universal accent after several hundred years, universally adopt a vaguely American two-party system and government? It’s…yeah, I have trouble believing that too.)

Although the disability representation is excellent, as I said before, I did find it odd that it wasn’t a part of Castor’s radicalization; being disabled in the 21st century is already a cyberpunk dystopia as it is, so I’m surprised that there wasn’t much discussion of not just Castor’s experience with being disabled, but how it affected their work or their perception of politics. Save for a throwaway line about an autistic person being driven to a life of crime because of how poorly said autism was treated and handled, there wasn’t much rumination on it other than that. I get that the main focus of Junker Seven was trans resistance specifically, I do wish we at least got more of it than what we got. Come to think of it…as diverse as Junker Seven was, there wasn’t a whole lot of intersectionality in terms of politics. I think there was…maybe one line about race and police brutality, and that was about it? I wouldn’t say that this is inherently a flaw of the book itself, but, once again, given how unabashedly political it was, I did find it odd that there wasn’t at least a small mention of the intersection of queer/trans issues with aspects like race, class, and disability.

All in all, a solid piece of queer sci-fi which suffered from unoriginal and nonsensical worldbuilding, but was nonetheless a shining ode to queer resistance. 3.5 stars!

Junker Seven is the first of the Twin Suns duology, followed by the forthcoming sequel Rebel Rising, which is slated for release in September. Kelley has also released D3F3CT: A Twin Suns Novella, set in the same universe as Junker Seven, as well as the novellas As the Light Goes Out and A Very Lighthouse Christmas. They have also contributed to Spectrum: An Autistic Horror Anthology and the forthcoming Dead Cowpokes Don’t Wrangle: A Weird West Anthology.

Today’s song:

why, why, WHY DID I PUT OFF LISTENING TO THIS ALBUM FOR SO LONG??

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 (5/14/24) – Dear Wendy

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Hooooooooooooo-whee…rant incoming…they’re good for the soul. Sometimes. I hate to do this so soon after I posted this year’s AAPI Heritage Month recommendations, but I just had to get this review off my chest. I highly recommend all of those books over this one.

God. I really wanted to like this one. Older YA where the characters are in college are few and far-between, and what’s even fewer and further-between is aromantic/asexual representation, much less POC aro-ace representation. I almost DNF’d this one, but I really wanted to stick it out and see if it turned out any better…and tragically, it didn’t. I hate to say it, but Dear Wendy was one of the most stiffly-written books I’ve read in quite a while.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Dear Wendy – Ann Zhao

Sophie Chi and Jo Ephron are both second-semester freshmen at Wellesley College, and they don’t know that they know each other. Sophie runs Dear Wendy, an Instagram account that gives love advice to Wellesley’s student body, and Jo runs Dear Wanda, a much more unhinged parody of the former with joke advice to contrast Wendy’s more serious online persona. The two meet in real life and immediately hit it off—they’re both aroace, and have never met many people, even in the queer community, who have experienced the same things as them. But as their online feud as Wendy and Wanda gets heated, Sophie and Jo must decide if they want to divulge their mutual secret—and risk their real friendship.

TW/CW: aphobia, anxiety, bullying, discussions of coming out/non-accepting parents (brief)

Ooof. Even from an outside perspective (as a non-ace person, but still queer), there’s a noticeable dearth of asexual-/aromantic- spectrum stories, even in YA, which is usually several steps ahead of the game as far as being progressive. So in concept, I’m glad that Dear Wendy exists, and I’m sure it will help a ton of a-spec people find their voices and feel seen. But good lord, this was easily one of the most poorly-written novels I’ve read all year. I’m genuinely baffled that I read the same book as all of the other people who left such glowing reviews. Baffled. Again, speaking from an outside perspective, but I think the a-spec community deserves better than this…

I usually preface my negative reviews with this, but I’ll say it again, because it always applies: I’m willing to give a certain amount of slack to Ann Zhao since Dear Wendy is her debut novel. It’s so hard to put pen to paper, and harder still to get it published, and that in and of itself is an intense labor of love. And I’m so glad that this book exists for some people for its discussions of AAPI, aroace, and gender non-conforming identity. I’m sure it’ll be a book that will mean a great deal to a great deal of people.

But. But.

All that doesn’t fully excuse how painfully stiff Zhao’s writing was. Dear Wendy would have been a DNF for me had I not stubbornly tried to stick it out, just because I was convinced that the rest of the book wouldn’t be a disappointment. I wanted to give it a chance, with the combination of the premise and the fact that it’s Zhao’s debut. I had faith that it would get better, but it never did. For a novel that purported itself to be charming and emotional, the writing felt more like a textbook or a brochure than fiction—never once did any of the characters feel like real people talking. The novel was full of writing choices that just felt downright odd; at some point, we hear one of the main characters eavesdropping on two other characters (about the Social Media Drama™️), and after each of these side characters speak, we get their first and last names—and then never hear from them again. Characters list out song titles like they’re being read aloud by Siri, and all of the attempts at humor are just the characters doing word-for-word reenactments of jokes from Tumblr and TikTok without any attempts to hide the evidence. And for two characters that are supposed to have opposing personalities, their voices blended together in an indistinguishable, bland mess—the only way we can “tell” is through the differences in their fabricated social media personalities. If I wanted to be hit over the head with something that unsubtly, I would’ve stood under the ice dispenser in the dining hall. But through it all, I was just struck by how none of the people acted like people—they acted like social media fabrications of queer people, and the world was similarly dictated through an artificial lens.

Dear Wendy is full of a myriad of relevant topics: aroace identity and acceptance, the suffocation of allosexual culture and the unrelenting pressure to find “the one,” and immigrant parents who don’t fully accept your queerness, to name a few. I’ll say again how glad I am that these subjects are being discussed in literature, because it’s true—we do need to talk about these things! But their delivery, more than not, zigzagged around one of the most time-worn rules of writing: show, don’t tell. Although this is realistic fiction, I feel like it falls into the same kind of mistakes that some sci-fi or fantasy novels make when they deliver information that is new to the reader: they deliver it in unpalatable blocks, making time all but stop in the narrative just so the author can explain The Important Thing™️. This was how most of the discussions felt in Dear Wendy; instead of a new worldbuilding point, it was just the character’s inner monologue, uninterrupted, for at least two pages at the longest. I get that it’s crucial to weave in these points, but there’s a way to do it without harming the flow of the story—once or twice is fine, when there’s a reason for the character to be so deep inside their head, but given that this story was supposed to center around Sophie and Jo’s relationship, there could have been so many more bonding scenes where they talked about this organically! That’s not to say that those scenes weren’t there, but since we were already stuck in inner monologue limbo 50 pages ago, none of the information was new, and therefore, none of the bonding felt like new ground.

In the author’s note, Ann Zhao calls this a love letter to Wellesley College, and that although her experience there wasn’t all good, she wanted to highlight the good in Dear Wendy. Remember what I said about the stiff writing? It applied to the surroundings, too. If her writing style contained…any sort of soul, then that mission statement would have come across. Instead, I felt like I was reading a college website for some parts of the novel. I got so far in to Zhao’s descriptions of the campus and the features of the dining hall that I had to blink and question whether or not she’d been paid to write all this by the college. Look—I’m sure Wellesley is a great place (historically women’s colleges are fantastic!) and I don’t want to negate the love that Zhao had for her time there, but there were so many places where the descriptions didn’t feel, again, like people experiencing their environment—it was just being dictated through a lens so devoid of personality that I felt like I was on a college tour, forced to hear a long-winded monologue about a bunch of landmarks that I’d never see again.

Usually, I’m in favor of a little pop culture referencing once in a while. I’ve never understood the argument that pop culture references in YA fiction take them out of the story. What, is fiction supposed to exist in some kind of culture-less vacuum? God forbid your characters engage with the same media as you do…god forbid you pay homage to the creators that inspired you to put pen to paper, apparently? If there’s anything that actually takes me out of the story, it’s the fake celebrities/artists/social media apps. (I get that a lot of that is dodging copyright, but the point still stands.) The argument has never made sense to me. Sure, dumping them all in a barrage is obviously a no-no, but there’s an art to a well-placed reference, and it’s an art that I appreciate. I have a completely arbitrary Goodreads shelf for books with good music references. (This one almost went on it just for an off-hand mention of Mitski.) But reading Dear Wendy made me understand where the anti-pop culture reference people are coming from. The whole book felt like a front to shove in as many references as humanly possible. Dear Wendy is over 360 pages—it wouldn’t have killed Zhao to cut out the chapter entirely consisting of Jo and Sophie talking about Harry Styles. The only places where the music references in particular felt relevant where when Jo was DJ-ing at the college station, and even then, when she was talking to Sophie about her upcoming song choices, it felt like they were being queued up and read aloud by Siri. Mind you, this wasn’t when Jo was actually DJ-ing—this was when she was talking to her friend. It only would have been worse if she’d said “Remastered version” in verbal parentheses.

And…god. If another book tries to smother me with this many Taylor Swift references, I’m going to chew my kindle in half. It’s already bad enough that even the dining hall TV was showing me news clips about whatever mediocre thing she’s doing…please, I thought literature was supposed to be an escape…

All in all, a platonic love story with all the ingredients for something meaningful and sweet that substituted personality and charm for stiffness and irrelevant references. 1.5 stars.

Dear Wendy is a standalone and Ann Zhao’s debut.

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 (5/7/24) – Off With Their Heads

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles! I’ve returned from finals hell!

I’ve been a massive fan of Zoe Hana Mikuta ever since I fell in love with her Gearbreakers duology a few years back. Off With Her Heads is her most recent novel, having just come out in late April, and even though I would’ve read it no matter what genre it was in, the idea of her writing a novel loosely based on Alice in Wonderland intrigued me—and it did not disappoint.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Off With Their Heads – Zoe Hana Mikuta

Wonderland is full of monsters.

After a deadly plague ravaged the land, most of the remaining witches and magic-users have transformed into monstrous Saints: bloated, bloodthirsty beasts that scour the land looking for fresh meat. Carousel Rabbit and Iccadora Alice Sickle were brought up in a world of predators and plague, orphaned at a young age and eventually escaping their decrepit orphanage together, madly in love with each other. But their obsession tore them apart, and their paths diverged.

Now, Caro has become the Red Queen’s royal butcher, killing Saints and watching as the Queen stitches together Saints of her own through dark, flesh-binding magic. Alice has been on her own for years, slaughtering Saints to get by. With every Saint that she kills, she treads closer and closer to the Red Queen’s throne—and to Caro, who Alice will stop at nothing to bring down to size. But what she finds in the Red Queen’s palace may be even greater of a threat than the love that once tore her to shreds…

TW/CW: loss of loved ones (past), murder, graphic violence, body horror, disease, blood, gore

Dark fairytale (or fairytale-adjacent) books used to be everywhere on the YA landscape. It’s the kind of stuff I ate up from about ages 12 to 16, to various degrees of quality. What they had in common, however, were universally horrible covers. God. They’ve circled back around to being hilarious now, but you could just snag any book off of the YA fantasy shelf at Barnes & Noble, and it would have a cover with an airbrushed white girl with flowy hair and an equally flowy gown either spinning gracefully or fixing your stare with a photoshopped smolder. And the gown was usually melting into…I don’t know, feathers or blood or some shit. It was all very emo. Since then, this subgenre has slowly begun to die down in popularity (or maybe not? My tastes have probably just shifted). Whether or not Off With Their Heads is the slow beginning of that subgenre’s resurgence in YA remains to be seen, but either way, I’m glad that we’ve got much prettier covers for the next generation of budding YA readers. It’s what they deserve. (Give it up for Tran Nguyen’s gorgeous cover art!)

After the Gearbreakers duology, I figured that I would read just about anything that Zoe Hana Mikuta writes. Even if Godslayers was a bit of a lackluster series concluder, it was still a fun read. Even if it isn’t her best work, you’re going to have a good time reading it regardless. Gearbreakers got a fair bit grim, as dystopias are wont to do, but Off With Their Heads is the darkest that Mikuta has ever gone (so much so that it almost borders on new adult and not YA), and she writes it with a unique talent. Whether or not the urge was pent-up, this novel revels in the “dark” of the “dark fairytale retelling,” drenching Alice in Wonderland in bloodlust, obsession, and backstabbing. However, what a lot of the dark fairytales of yesteryear interpreted darkness as was just being edgy; most everything was for shock value and appealing to the “what if this fairytale was………BAD and EVIL” urge that ropes in all the 13-year-olds and it didn’t go far beyond that. But this genuinely feels like horror, and not being an edgelord for edginess’ sake. It’s gory, it’s grim, and it’s bloody, but more in the interest of horror than shock—these characters are surviving a truly horrific world, and it turns them into horrific people for understandable reasons. There’s a distinction to be made there, and Mikuta certainly recognized it. (Also, it’s worth noting that Off With Their Heads is unflinchingly queer, which, given that most of said older fairytale retellings only added in queerness when it was a side character that would inevitably die, is a vast improvement. The bar is low, but it’s noteworthy that it’s being exceeded nonetheless. Let’s go, lesbians!)

I’ve seen a lot of reviews call Caro and Alice “morally gray,” and…I have some thoughts. I almost see it. Almost. But if they were gray, it would be an incredibly dark gray, if anything. Maybe they were morally gray at the beginning, but by the time we get to the present timeline, they’ve both become such awful people that they’re nearly indistinguishable from the one evil person that they’re respectively allured by (Caro) and disgusted by (Alice)—the Red Queen. To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi (hey, I missed my chance on May 4th), they’ve both become the very thing they swore to destroy. They’re both just despicable people, but their differences are written in such a way that their different breeds of horridness play off of each other fascinatingly; Caro’s become this world’s version of a class traitor and idolizes the pinnacle of evil, while Alice has become so consumed with revenge that she’ll justify just about anything. Add in the fact that the root of their personal vendettas lie in their past romantic relationship, and you’ve got a dynamic that was delicious to pick apart for all 400+ pages of the novel. Again, it all makes sense for the truly cutthroat circumstances they were brought up in—they’re products of their surroundings, in the worst possible way.

Even as someone who doesn’t engage with a ton of horror media in general, I know that the key to executing it is making the suspense feel real, especially if the threats in your world are entirely fictional and alien to the audience. Mikuta had a multitude of ways that kept the suspense palpable, and all of them hooked me over the course of the novel. I’m not sure why it is that the “There are [x] remaining Saints” count excited me so much at the beginning of each chapter, but it was a failsafe way to keep track of both the danger and the kill count of the various characters—the tangible effects of the butchering they’re described as doing. Having those numbers up front also provided a sense of scale; in the present timeline, the Saints numbered in the thousands, giving an idea of just how dangerous being in Wonderland truly is—you can’t go for a walk in the woods without encountering a bloated, bloodthirsty, and quite possibly engineered monstrosity on the prowl for flesh. It’s a constant danger—and Mikuta make it feel much more dangerous just by having a chapter subheading.

However, what brought down some of my suspension of disbelief was the worldbuilding. Clearly, there was attention to detail, but only in the ways that Mikuta saw fit. There were tidbits here and there that I wished were expanded on—I loved the concept of the original Alice dreaming being this world’s creation myth, but we never got anything more out of that past the prologue. Outside of things like the Saints and the royal lineage, the worldbuilding was rather messy. I get that Off Their Heads is a very loose retelling at best—just using Alice and Wonderland and its characters as a jumping-off point for the setting—but there were so many convoluted and contradictory bits that I wasn’t completely invested. It’s mentioned that there’s a Jabberwocky court amongst the gentry of Wonderland who are described as humanoid, and yet the girls find a Jabberwocky in the woods described monstrously that has clear intention to kill them. Either that was a poorly-described Saint, or there’s some inconsistencies that need to be addressed. The reworking of Alice in Wonderland-related names into the characters were also a bit sloppy and corny; I get that there’s got to be some signal to the source material, but they were often so obvious, and barely related to the original character that they just made me cringe. I expected more from Mikuta on this front—slapping on character names just to remind the reader that, yes, this is a retelling, doesn’t seem like her style. I almost think it would have worked better if all of the Alice in Wonderland pretense was stripped away and made into a dystopian fantasy world.

Overall, an unflinchingly horrific retelling that displays Mikuta’s love and talent for suspense and obsessive sapphics—but her pitfalls in worldbuilding. 3.75 stars, rounded up to 4!

Off With Their Heads is a standalone, but Zoe Hana Mikuta is also the author of the Gearbreakers duology (Gearbreakers and Godslayers), and an untitled novel slated for release in 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!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (3/26/24) – The Cybernetic Tea Shop

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

There’s a special place in my heart dedicated to cozy sci-fi, but the sad thing about it is that hardly anybody does it well save for Becky Chambers. I guess it’s hard to reach the bar when it’s been set astronomically high (no pun intended), but I will still read any cozy sci-fi that comes my way, despite the amount of times that the blurb “for fans of Becky Chambers!” has severely led me astray. However, in the midst of my reading slump, The Cybernetic Tea Shop was the perfect novella to tide me over and lift my spirits.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Cybernetic Tea Shop – Meredith Katz

After the death of her master, Sal, an autonomous robot operating outside of the laws of a futuristic America, runs the tea shop that her master founded. For hundreds of years, she has run it like a well-oiled machine, but something in her program seeks something more. When Clara, an AI technician struggling to make ends meet, walks into Sal’s tea shop by chance, they have an instant spark of friendship—and perhaps even something more. Is Clara what Sal needed all along, and is Sal the key to the similarly vacant space in Clara’s heart?

TW/CW: loss of loved ones (past)/discussions of grief, hate crimes/discrimination (sci-fi)

Since about 2021, I’ve lost count of the amount of times that the tagline “for fans of Becky Chambers!” has let me down. Nobody does cozy sci-fi like her; all of the times I’ve read books with that promise, you get some semblance of found family (which comes off rather forced, in the worst instances), but it often lacks the quiet, tender moments that put the cozy prefix in. However, in that respect, I’m glad to say that The Cybernetic Tea Shop wasn’t a letdown—not without its flaws, for sure, but more than enough to scratch my never-ending cozy sci-fi itch.

I’ve been in a very novella-centered headspace for months, given that I’m trying to write one for class and I’ve been studying how they work for said class as well. One of the foremost concerns we’ve been talking about is how much worldbuilding you can fit into such a small space—often 100 pages or less. The key, I’ve learned, is, after giving your reader the necessary context to make the world feel real, is to only expand on the parts that are essential to understanding the circumstances of your characters. Katz did an excellent job of establishing this kind of worldbuilding, and it speaks to what a novella can achieve in such a small page count! Inevitably, I found myself wanting more of the futuristic American setting that Katz built, but the context we get is only what we need to understand Sal: the creation of intelligent robots, the outlawing of said robots because of ethical complications with intelligence, and the discrimination and illegality of robots in the centuries since. It’s the perfect foundation to set up not just the world, but the conflicts that these characters encounter.

Cozy sci-fi, by nature, often keeps things small; a handful of characters, a singular setting, and all else happening in the background. Novellas, also by nature, typically scale it down as well. The Cybernetic Tea Shop only centers around two characters, but that’s all it really needs; this novella is small in every aspect, and that’s why it largely succeeded. By narrowing down two characters (and their budding romance) and a single, unique setting, Katz confined her world to reasonable limits to explore in a novella; nothing ever felt too convoluted or too large to fit into just over 100 pages, but it didn’t feel too sparse, either. Similarly, aside from the character-driven focus (also the backbone of cozy sci-fi), there’s hardly any plot points, and that was actually a strength of The Cybernetic Tea Shop—in terms of structure, it was practically a Goldilocks of novellas.

However, although the general craft of the novella was commendable, the writing left a lot to be desired. For such a fascinating world and two characters moving through it in a unique way, I wanted so much more from the writing. The prose was rather bare-bones, doing the bare minimum to describe a setting or situation. I wanted so many more descriptions—and genuinely interesting descriptions— of Sal’s tea shop; you can do so many fun things with a tea shop, but I hardly got a sense for what it looked like, what it smelled like, or any other kind of sensory details. Similarly, the dialogue, although it had moments of being sweet, was often bland and stiff, and felt transactional in terms of the prose—just a way to get from point A to point B. Given that the romance between Clara and Sal was what eventually drove the novella, transactional dialogue is the exact opposite of what The Cybernetic Tea Shop needed; the kind of romance that Katz was shooting for wanted to be anything but transactional, but ended up falling flat.

In addition, I found myself wanting more from the characters. Again: cozy sci-fi is a heavily character-driven subgenre, and the evolving relationships between the characters are what make the plot go forward, and not necessarily outside conflict. I did like that Katz only zoomed in on Clara and Sal, but I almost wish that the novella had been all from Sal’s perspective. We get a very detailed and nuanced vision of Sal’s character, from her grieving her long-dead master to her insecurities and fears about being in hiding as an autonomous robot. Clara, on the other hand, was given very little of the same treatment; I would have liked to have seen her have some kind of romantic hurdle to overcome—commitment issues, hesitance, or something along those lines—that would make her something more than just a tool to instigate romance. We did get some of her background, but it didn’t add to much about her in terms of personality—the only part of her character that paired her with Sal was that she’s an AI technician, and therefore in a place to help Sal. With the focus on two characters, it would do Katz a favor to give both of them the fleshing-out that they deserve.

That being said, although Clara’s characterization left a lot to be desired, I did like the more romantic aspect of the plot towards the end of the novella. Even beyond the super sweet asexual/wlw representation (both Sal and Clara are asexual and sapphic!), there was a lot about the romance that worked; the setup of Clara fixing Sal’s programming evolving into cuddling was such an adorable and genius setup, and the resolution that came from it was similarly heartwarming. It did feel slightly rushed, but aside from that, Katz left it in a place where I didn’t quite want more, but was satisfied in knowing that their relationship was bound to blossom. I wanted something cute, and I got something cute, so Katz 100% succeeded on that front!

All in all, a tender, cozy novella with sweet romance and tight structure, but bland prose and half-baked characterizations. 3.5 stars!

The Cybernetic Tea Shop is a standalone, but Meredith Katz is the author of several other novels for adults, including the Pandemonium series (The Cobbler’s Soleless Son, Behind Bars, Heir to the Throne, and Barred Souls), the Sixth Sense Investigations series (Empty Vessels and If Wishes Were Fishes), and many more.

Today’s song:

shoutout to chelsea wolfe for playing this before her show. 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 ARC Reviews

ARC Review: Kindling – Traci Chee

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

And you may ask yourself…me? Doing ARC reviews again? Kind of. I did stop doing them in late high school because my schedule was getting too busy to stay on top of them, and now, I’m even busier than I was back then, so I doubt I’ll go back to Edelweiss. But I entered myself into a Goodreads giveaway for Kindling, and I was lucky enough to receive a physical ARC! I’m glad to say that Traci Chee’s latest fantasy novel doesn’t disappoint—innovative and heartbreaking in equal measure.

Enjoy this ARC review!

Kindling – Traci Chee

The war is over, but in the wreckage are kindlings. They are child soldiers, pawns imbued with unimaginable powers who fought and died on the front lines, all for a war effort they could not comprehend. Now, there is peace, but it is uneasy—the violence has not ceased, and those who were left stranded by the war have nowhere left to go. From the ashes, seven former kindlings have come out of the woodwork, ready to fight one last battle to ensure the safety of their country—and their futures.

I received this copy in a Goodreads giveaway. Thank you to HarperCollins publishing and Goodreads for this ARC!

TW/CW: graphic violence, child soldiers, blood, war themes, PTSD, loss of loved ones

Without a doubt, this is Traci Chee’s most experimental—and most tragic—book to date. It’s a book that manages to execute so many feats of acrobatics and lands every single one of them; in every way, Kindling is a success!

First off: the element that probably grabbed everyone straightaway. Not only does Kindling have seven POVs, all of them are written in second person. Both of those tricks are already a hefty load to take on, but to execute them both at the same time? That’s just madness. And yet Traci Chee pulls it off with flying colors. A lot of second-person fiction that I’ve read uses it as a way to draw the reader in, but after that, there’s nothing innovative about the story beyond a difficult POV to the story. But Chee utilizes it in such a unique way—it’s not just a clever trick, but a way to make us feel closer to these characters. You are the one witnessing these atrocities, war ravaging the land. You are the one watching your friends die. There’s an instant connection. And for the most part (with some exceptions), Chee manages to make all of the characters feel distinct while pulling off second person. Now that’s impressive.

I always love novels that explore the aftermath of war, or at least some kind of conflict; in a sea of both fantasy and sci-fi novels that have neat, happy endings in the wake of devastating wars, Chee really seems to understand the messiness of picking up the pieces after such a tragedy has ripped the world of Kindling apart. Everything happens after the war that changed the characters’ lives, and everything is still in chaos and turmoil. Aside from the “one last fight” trope, used as an homage to the inspirations for this novel (Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven), it gave a ripe opportunity to explore trauma—not just the inherent trauma that comes with being a child soldier, but the trauma of grappling with PTSD at a very young age, and the trauma of being deified by the war effort, in Amity’s case. Never at any point is Kindling an easy read—and that’s exactly the way it should be.

Kindling is squarely a found family novel, but Chee explores an aspect of it that is often overlooked—found families formed through trauma. Each of the characters, most of which are appropriately fleshed out, are given the individuality and arcs that they deserve, but all of them are informed by the war, and their status as ex-Kindlings is what binds them—and motivates them. They’re sticking together for survival, but the friendships that they form in the heart of hardship are what makes the core of this novel so emotional. There are so many tender moments shared between the characters, and they made the stakes of this novel so much more palpable—you felt, more than ever, that they really were children, and that they would never be the same after being used as pawns of war.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Tragically, Traci Chee also demonstrates in this novel the two most crushing ways of writing fictional deaths. Particularly with Emara and Amity, Chee is skilled at timing them just right to make the most impact on both the reader and the characters. Emara’s death was the most sudden, and it having it happen so quickly after building up that she might have been safe was a way to not just shake the characters, but up the stakes—if Emara wasn’t safe, then neither were the rest of them. Amity, on the other hand, was set up from the beginning to die from Kindling burnout (the result of overuse of her magical powers), but you got to know her so deeply and intimately that, even though you knew from the beginning that she was doomed, her death felt just as tragic as it would have been if it was completely unexpected, like Emara. What I’m trying to say is that this book destroyed me. Traci Chee knows how to do it a little too well.

All in all, a novel that balanced tenderness and tragedy in equal amounts, making for a poignant novel about war and the bonds that bind us. 4 stars!

Release date: February 27, 2024

Kindling is a standalone, but Traci Chee is also the author of the Sea of Ink and Gold trilogy (The Reader, The Speaker, and The Storyteller), We Are Not Free, and A Thousand Steps Into Night.

Today’s song:

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (1/16/24) – Godkiller

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Godkiller has been out for almost a year now, and it’s been on my radar since last December. Fantasy is second to sci-fi for me, especially where high fantasy like this is concerned, but the compelling characters and the lush, queer-normative world drew me in. Sure would be a shame if the second book wasn’t out yet…oh.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Godkiller (Fallen Gods, #1) – Hannah Kaner

In the kingdom of Middren, the worship or belief in gods of any kind is strictly forbidden. The gods of Middren grow bigger and stronger with every human that believes in them, but after a devastating war between the gods and humankind, Middren has deemed them too dangerous to continue living. In the aftermath, the last gods are hunted down by Godkillers. Kissen is a Godkiller; after her family was slaughtered by a fire god, she has taken up the mantle to ensure that what happened to her family never happens to anyone again. But when she stumbles upon Inara, a noble-born child with a minor god bonded to her, she knows that the only way to break the bond without killing her is to go to Blenraden, the last stronghold of the wild gods. The road ahead will be filled with unexpected allies and strange turns, but Kissen and Inara are weary. For a war is brewing once more, and they may be caught in the middle…

TW/CW: loss of loved ones (on- and off-page), fire, blood, violence, animal death, child death, sacrifice (human/animal), war themes, PTSD

It’s incredibly rare that I enjoy any kind of high fantasy these days, especially with the vaguely European setting and medieval technology level. But Hannah Kaner has managed to elevate all of those elements and create something truly special—a queer-normative high fantasy with no trouble being itself in a sea of carbon copies. I thoroughly enjoyed this one!

I’m all for a good trope subversion, and this presents an especially delicious one that even I’m aspiring to add into my own writing. I’ve seen a ton of posts/general discourse about how a lot of creators have shied away from making female characters that match common archetypes, but since many of the archetype’s traits are seen as more masculine, it’s almost entirely male characters that end up making up the demographic. In this case, you have the hardened warrior-type who reluctantly ends up taking a child under their wing who eventually melts their cold heart. It’s a trope I’ve always loved, but I’ve rarely seen it done with female characters. Along comes Kissen, and I’m reminded of how excellent the trope can be when it’s done exceptionally well. She has the classic personality of the archetype, but done in a way that makes her character feel fleshed out—she isn’t just hardened for the heck of it, and you get to see exactly how and why she became that way. Her interactions with Inara, from the initial reluctance (which, again, is developed more than “I don’t need a child around”) to her motherly role towards the end, felt tenderly genuine, and watching their relationship develop was one of the highlights of the book.

You know me. I’m all for queer-normative and disability-friendly sci-fi and fantasy worlds, but Godkiller feels so special precisely because of how high fantasy has historically treated both of those things. For disabled characters in particular, it’s practically an expectation that they have to be bitter and constantly in a state of suffering because being in a medieval setting where their disability is minimally understood automatically makes them a weakling. But Godkiller flips that entirely on its head—not only is the main character disabled (facial scars and a prosthetic leg), but it isn’t a main part of the plot; never do we see Kissen suffering for the plot because she’s disabled, and her disability is seen as something neutral, and something to be cared for accordingly. (There is some discussion about the discrimination that Kissen faces because of her scars, but it’s more on the front of being marked by a curse and not necessarily the scars themselves.) One of the side characters is also Deaf, and not only was she one of my favorite side characters, her scenes were explicitly shown so that the reader could see how happy she was with her wife! The fictional sign language was also treated in a similarly neutral/positive way—there’s even a bit of worldbuilding where Kaner explains that sign language isn’t just used by Deaf or mute people in Middren, but it’s used by pirates on the high seas to communicate when the roar of the ocean drowns out speech. 10/10 worldbuilding. 10/10 disabled representation, and 10/10 disabled people in happy relationships.

The god-killing premise was also one of the main draws for me about Godkiller, hence the name. It could have been easy for a book like this to ride on the premise being interesting and then proceed to do hardly anything out of the ordinary to it, but Kaner’s worldbuilding surrounding the gods of Middren was excellent! Every kind of god is explained, and I loved the wide variety of gods that we saw throughout the novel, from the more formidable ones that caused the war to minor gods like Skediceth, who were just little creatures with surprisingly formidable powers. I also loved the concept of gods tangibly feeding off of belief—the more shrines there are, the more powerful a god continues to be. Not only did this flesh out the worldbuilding, but it made a lot of elements that would have otherwise been forgettable contribute to the overall stakes of the novel.

My only major complaint about Godkiller was the ending. The pacing was solid for most of the novel, but the ending felt so much more rushed compared to the rest of it. The stakes got milder for a significant stretch, but it only felt like they were amped up in the last 5-10 pages just so that Kaner could tie in a thread to the sequel and remind the reader that Godkiller wasn’t a standalone. It was one of those endings that had me turning back to the last page and then back to the acknowledgements and wondering “wait, that it was it? that was the ending?” For how cleverly most of the novel was constructed, it just felt so sudden and sloppy compared to the rest of it.

All in all, one of the better high fantasy novels I’ve read in a while, with lovable characters, a refreshingly disability-friendly world, and neat, fascinating worldbuilding. 4 stars!

Godkiller is the first novel in the Fallen Gods series, followed by Sunbringer, which is slated for release this March. Godkiller is Hannah Kaner’s debut novel.

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 (12/26/23) – The Siren, the Song, and the Spy (The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, #2)

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles! Also, a belated Merry Christmas and a Happy Kwanzaa to those celebrating!

To my parents: I tried so hard not to finish this in one day. I tried. But it was just too good. Just like how I devoured The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea around two and a half years ago, its sequel, The Siren, the Song, and the Spy captured my heart, and added some intricate depth, timely commentary, and no shortage of emotion to Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s fantasy world. Also to my parents: thank you so much for the incredible Christmas present!

WARNING: this review may contain spoilers for The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea—tread lightly!

for my review of book 1, click here!

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Siren, the Song, and the Spy (The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, #2) – Maggie Tokuda-Hall

After the Pirate Supreme and their crew wounded the Emperor’s fleet, they have gone into hiding, growing the Resistance that they hope will end the colonial rule that has trapped them for decades. In the ruins of the battle, Genevieve, a loyal daughter of the empire, has washed up on the Red Shore. Now in the company of strangers, she must decide where her loyalties truly lie—and decide for herself if the empire has lied to her all along. Back on the mainland, Alfie is a spy in the Imperial Palace, hoping to tear it down from the inside. But when everyone is hiding false intentions, who can he trust in his quest to see the Resistance win?

Meanwhile, the Sea readies for battle, looking for vengeance after years of the Emperor robbing her of her daughters…

TW/CW: colonialism, genocide, blood, murder, self-harm (ritual), racism, animal death (off-page), ableism

I would have been satisfied if The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea was a standalone—it had an ambiguous, hopeful ending, and it’s rare to see novels that willingly keep their worlds in one book after an ending styled like that. Usually, when authors go and make said ambiguous but satisfying endings not so ambiguous by expanding the story and the world, it feels hollow—the sequel doesn’t always live up to the original, and sometimes, it just feels like a cash grab. The Siren, the Song, and the Spy is none of these things. It does what every sequel (and duology-closer) should do—it makes the already beloved characters, world, and plot all the more intricate and vast, but has no trouble sticking the landing and wrapping things up.

I think The Siren has the most POVs I’ve ever seen in a single book; some POVs only appear once or twice, but even still, I can think of at least ten (maybe more, I didn’t go back and count) that this novel cycles through over the course of just 320 pages. Usually, any number of POVs over five or six is too much for any author to handle; some characters don’t get developed the way they should, and some of them don’t need the page time or the internal dialogue that other characters need to make the story move forward. Normally, uneven emphasis on certain characters is also a flaw of multiple-POV novels. However, what Tokuda-Hall succeeded in was knowing when characters needed attention and when they didn’t; some chapters are dedicated to side characters, but they’re few and far between, and often shorter than the main character chapters. And somehow, by a stroke of luck, all of them felt necessary to the narrative—and all of them were compelling. Even minor antagonists got their time in the spotlight, but Tokuda-Hall used those moments to her advantage—sometimes, these chapters were more to reveal secrets than to peer inside characters’ heads. It’s a skill that very few authors have, but The Siren proved that Maggie Tokuda-Hall is incredibly adept at the art of the multiple-POV novel.

With Evelyn and Florian mostly out of the picture, The Siren develops many of the side characters present in The Mermaid—many of whom got necessary backstories, and often, something of a redemption arc. I didn’t expect to start rooting for Alfie after everything that he did in The Mermaid, but Tokuda-Hall did an excellent job of making him come to realize the error in his ways, and at least partially put him on the path to improvement. I don’t fully believe that he can ever be fully forgiven, and Tokuda-Hall acknowledges that, but what she’s also very skilled at is created complicated characters—”morally gray,” as much as it’s become a buzzword in both book communities and publishing these days, really is the best word for it. The difference is that Tokuda-Hall actually seems to know what the term really means. Introducing a batch of new characters (and not taking the easy route and killing a bunch of them off) was also a tricky task to surmount for Siren, but both the new characters and locations elevated the novel a ton; Koa and Kaia worked incredibly off of each other as siblings with wildly different personalities, and they meshed easily with some of the already established characters like Genevieve. And as with Mermaid, Siren is full of diversity—most of the new characters are people of color (as are most of the characters in the novel), and we also have Kaia, who has one hand, and a character who uses neopronouns.

Speaking of Genevieve…

I was already excited to see what Genevieve would do next after how Mermaid left off, but that was mostly because of how cunning of a character she was. At first, it didn’t seem necessary to me for her to have a redemption arc—she could have been such a sneaky minor villain, and I would’ve enjoyed seeing that develop. But her character arc was so much more than redemption—it was one of the most well-written case studies in colonial brainwashing and subsequent decolonization that I’ve read in years. What with her POV jumping back and forth between the past and the present, you can see exactly the kind of manipulation that went into her being duped into believing in Lady Ayer and the Emperor, betraying her own identity in the process. Her change of heart wasn’t straightforward either—it was plenty messy, and it wasn’t until she actually witnessed a full-on genocide that she realized what the empire was actually doing all along, but the messiness in the middle was what made her arc so memorable. Decolonizing one’s identity is anything but straightforward, and Genevieve’s journey of restructuring her beliefs and identity was rocky—as it should have been. Genevieve alone should be proof of Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s incredible skill in crafting authentic, messy characters.

On the subject of colonization and decolonization, I also appreciate the realistic—and unrelentingly anti-colonial—approach that Tokuda-Hall took to bringing down the empire. The stakes built up over both books made them feel like a real threat, and not just a hollow “evil empire” that’s only evil because the author takes great pains to tell you so. (Basing this empire off of multiple real-life examples of colonialism probably helped, but my point still stands.) The initial takedown was was incredibly emotional, and appropriately incorporated the awesome forces of the Sea. But after that final battle, what stuck out to me the most was the epilogue; it was very brief and appropriately hopeful, but what it emphasized was so important to understanding the process of decolonization—it’s messy. Even several years after the fact, everything isn’t magically fixed—things take time to rebuild, and not everybody instantly changes their minds. In such a short amount of time, Tokuda-Hall managed to portray an essential reality of colonialism that most sci-fi and fantasy narratives miss: change isn’t instantaneous, and the limbo between changes in power is a long, messy process.

All in all, a worthy sequel that proves Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s many, incredible special talents as an author—juggling dozens of POVs with ease, writing flawed characters with complicated arcs, and giving both colonialism and decolonization with the nuance that’s often missing from fantasy and sci-fi portrayals of the subject. 4.5 stars!

The Siren, the Song, and the Spy is the sequel to The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, and is the end of the duology. Maggie Tokuda-Hall is also the author of several picture books and graphic novels, including Also an Octopus, Love in the Library, Squad, and the forthcoming The Worst Ronin.

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 (12/5/23) – The Witch King

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Far be it from me to start the month off with a negative review, but that’s just how my December started off. Eh. Should be a lesson to me for trying to read something that’s been on my TBR for 3+ years—my tastes generally don’t change dramatically in that amount of time, but my standards for writing and plot certainly did. That’s all to say that The Witch King was a promising, inclusive fantasy that quickly proved itself to be not worth my time.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Witch King (Witch King, #1) – H.E. Edgmon

Wyatt Croft is a witch, and in the North American realm of the fae, witches are the enemy. Years ago, Wyatt’s magic got out of control, forcing him to flee back to the human world and go into exile. But his betrothal to Emyr, the prince of the fae, has not dissolved, and Emyr is back on the hunt for him. Forced back into the world of the fae, Wyatt must come to terms with his engagement—one that may hold the lives of all of North America’s witches in the balance. And his feelings for Emyr may be coming back, as much as he wants to hide them…

TW/CW: transphobia, deadnaming/misgendering, blood, gore, abuse (physical and verbal), panic attacks, substance abuse, PTSD themes

DNF at 36%.

The Witch King has made me realize that I need to expand my criteria for DNFing books; most of my DNFs are 1-star books—the ones that are just so bad that I can’t finish them. In comparison to a lot of the other books on my DNF shelf, The Witch King wasn’t comparably as bad. But the difference is that at a certain point, it was just so clear to me that this book was not worth my time. I really wanted to like it, but once I got past the first third, there wasn’t any point in me finishing this book. A DNF is not always a 1-star read, but a 1-star read is not always a DNF. It’s like geometry but easier to explain.

I wanted to emphasize that I really wanted to like The Witch King. But in the 3+ years that this book has languished on my TBR, it’s clear that my standards have changed. The foreword by Edgmon was incredibly touching, and it’s so clear that this was the book of their soul—there’s no denying the love that went into this book. And it’s so, so important to support trans authors like him, but it’s just as important to remember that even when you read diversely, a book’s diversity doesn’t automatically fix every plot hole and writing issue. There’s some slack I’m willing to give Edgmon because this was his debut, but The Witch King really left a ton to be desired.

It’s clear that Edgmon put a lot of thought into constructing Wyatt’s character, but in his quest to make him as relatable as possible, Wyatt turned from simply “relatable” to an incompetent mess. Even as a queer person, there’s only so many “I am a gay little worm who makes terrible life decisions” (actual quote from the book) jokes I can take. Jesus Christ. The word “cringe” is outright abused these days, but I feel like this is a valid quality to ascribe to the writing of The Witch King, since most of the humor feels so overdone and unfunny. If your type of humor consists of Tumblr jokes from 2017, then boy, do I have the book for you. All of the attempts to make Wyatt seem more human and fallible made him just feel like a pathetic mess incapable of seeing past his personal faults and (many) mistakes. It absolutely grated on me after a certain point. The rest of the writing wasn’t all bad, but good god, Wyatt’s characterization made me want to jump ship almost immediately.

Since I abandoned ship after the first third, there’s probably some context that I inevitably missed, but the worldbuilding of the North American fae really left a ton to be desired. Apart from the rivalry between witches and fae, there really wasn’t much of an explanation as to how the fae worked in tandem with the human world: where do the borders between human and fae begin and end? How do the two interact? And more importantly, what are the different interactions between the different species of fae? There were a bunch of different creatures that were just thrown at you in the background with zero explanation, never to be seen again. There’s a difference between convoluted worldbuilding and worldbuilding that just isn’t properly thought-out, and this fell firmly into the latter camp. It was all just a hot mess. I’ve read several reviews saying similar things about the worldbuilding, so…I guess it never did get better beyond what I read? Oof.

That being said, I really appreciate the diversity that Edgmon wrote into The Witch King. Having a trans main character is so important, and as much as Wyatt got on my nerves, characters like him need to be in the spotlight. Edgmon presented a lot of character that were very diverse in terms of race, gender, and sexuality, and while it seems like the representation wasn’t all accurate and some of Edgmon’s depiction of social issues wasn’t handled as well as it could’ve been (glad I didn’t get to that part, I guess…), it’s always good to have a range of characters like that. It’s about all I have to say about The Witch King that’s positive, but it’s worth being highlighted.

All in all, a diverse fantasy debut that sadly crashed and burned in its characterization and lazy worldbuilding. 2 stars.

The Witch King is the first book in the Witch King duology, followed by The Fae Keeper. Edgmon is also the author of the Ouroboros series, which consists of Godly Heathens and Merciless Saviors.

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 (11/28/23) – Hunger Makes the Wolf

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Hunger Makes the Wolf came on my radar when I was looking for more books with disability rep (as always), but I ended up buying it on my Kindle after my dad notified me that I had some unused Kindle points (thank you for reminding me!)—it was free with the points added on, so how could I resist? And while Hunger Makes the Wolf wasn’t perfect, it’s a ton of gunslinging, space-fantasy fun.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Hunger Makes the Wolf (The Ghost Wolves, #1) – Alex Wells

Hob Ravani ekes out a living in the deserts of Tanegawa’s World, a planet owned by TransRifts—the corporation who controls the market on interstellar travel in the whole galaxy. For 10 years, Hob has gotten by with the help of the Ghost Wolves, a group of bandits roaming the desert and finding money where they can. But when Hob discovers the body of Nick, the man who recruited her to join the Wolves, abandoned in the desert, she knows that she has to act before TransRifts discovers their operation—and discovers the powers that she’s kept hidden from sight.

TW/CW: murder, descriptions of injuries, descriptions of corpses, violence, loss of loved ones, human experimentation

Writing accents phonetically is a slippery slope that I’m not going to get fully into in this review. In this case, though, Alex Wells had decent success with making everyone who was meant to sound like they had a Southern accent actually sound like they had a Southern accent, which worked—this novel was a space Western, after all. That being said, the unintended consequence was that Wells’ spelling of Hob’s accent was that I imagined her voice more like Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona than the badass, hardened gunslinger that she was made out to be. It sort of worked, though.

As far as sci-fi subgenres go, I’m not usually huge on space Westerns; I’ve rarely seen them done exceedingly well (even The Mandalorian got more than a little repetitive eventually), but the best are at least fun. And that was what Hunger Makes the Wolf was—incredibly fun. It had all of the trappings of a debut novel, but what Wells did get right on the first time was that pacing. Although the action sequences were what made Hunger such a blast to read in the best parts, Wells also knew how to balance them out with quiet, more emotional moments, and also moments to slip in worldbuilding without absolutely walloping you with it. Wells’ action was really the star of the show here; their fight scenes had just the right amount of tension, levity, and butt-kicking to make for more than one delightful scene.

Recently, I’ve read several sci-fi books that were marketed as “space fantasy,” and none of them have really fit the bill. And yet, Hunger Makes the Wolf wasn’t necessarily marketed as such, but it does what the other novels lacked. Even amidst the classic sci-fi backdrop of corporate greed, massive spaceships, and gruesome human experimentation, there’s the element of the characters’ strange hidden powers. Naming said powers “witchiness” was already a win in my book, the charm of it really fits the Western atmosphere that Wells was going for—it hits that sweet spot of not sounding overly jargon-y or formal, but not too hokey, either. Every time one of the characters mentioned it, I couldn’t help but smile—especially in Hob’s aforementioned Holly Hunter voice.

Hunger Makes the Wolf is an incredibly ambitious novel, and the ambition is accentuated when you remember that this is Alex Wells’ debut. In some ways, it worked; Wells managed to juggle a safe amount of the worldbuilding without leaving the reader without context, but also without dumping it excessively. However, what Wells did not juggle as well was the sheer amount of characters that we jump between. Hunger was clearly meant to have a found family theme to it, which I’m normally a sucker for, but Wells just had so many extraneous characters on their hands that none of the character relationships felt fleshed out. If we had gotten more scenes with Hob and the rest of the Wolves, for instance, I would have believed that they really were as thick as thieves. Adding onto this, the perspective switches may not have been necessary; Mags, although she plays a prominent role, doesn’t have a perspective or voice that added anything substantial to the narrative. It’s a classic debut author case: Alex Wells had some spot-on ideas, but they bit off far more than they could chew.

All in all, a rollicking space fantasy with action aplenty, but with characters that left me wanting more. 3.5 stars!

Hunger Makes the Wolf is the first book in the Ghost Wolves duology, followed by Blood Binds the Pack. Hunger was Alex Wells’ debut novel; they are also the author of the short story Angel of the Blockade.

Today’s song:

FARGO IS BACK I AM FOAMING AT THE MOUTH OH MY GOOOOOOOD

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