Tag: POC

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 (2/10/26) – This Great Hemisphere

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

This book came up in several searches I found looking for speculative fiction authors that I hadn’t heard of. It seemed more on the literary side of dystopia/sci-fi, but the premise seemed interesting enough, so I took the leap. Unfortunately, This Great Hemisphere falls into the same trap as many other literary sci-fi novels: all literary, hardly any sci-fi—or basic worldbuilding to speak of.

Enjoy this week’s review!

This Great Hemisphere – Mateo Askaripour

In the 26th century, Earth has become unrecognizable, and so have its people. Parts of the population have become Invisible; those who cannot be seen are relegated to manual labor and pushed to the margins of society. Sweetmint, and Invisible woman, has worked her entire life to ensure that she becomes more than another statistic, securing a top apprenticeship with a legendary non-Invisible businessman. But when her missing brother becomes the prime suspect in a politically-motivated murder, Sweetmint sets off to find him—and convince the rest of the world of his innocence.

TW/CW: racism, misogyny, violence, sexual assault, murder

I really just need to steer clear of literary sci-fi, at this point. Once in a blue moon, you’ll get something incredible, but I feel like authors who go from literary fiction straight into sci-fi forgo world/character building and just slap the same faux-deep prose into a vaguely speculative setting. To Mateo Askaripour’s credit, This Great Hemisphere goes slightly further than that, but beyond the basic premise, there’s not much about this novel that holds water.

Overall, This Great Hemisphere left a lot to be desired in terms of the worldbuilding, which I’ll get to later. That being said, the one part I really enjoyed about the novel was how fleshed-out the concepts of the Invisibles were. It’s the only bit of worldbuilding we really get, but at least what we have was somewhat substantial. I loved how Askaripour outlined not just how Invisibles are marginalized in this far-future society, but their own cultural quirks; I love the “scent-prints” that Invisibles recognize each other by without sight, and the fact that some paint themselves in order to be visible in DP society was fascinating to me. Askaripour fleshed out their social world well, and it made that part of the novel feel real. From the get-go, it’s easy to see how this becomes allegorical for racism. I found the allegory a little shallow, personally—it doesn’t go far beyond “racism is bad and it’s systemic,” and I would have liked it to have more nuance—say, the psychological effects of it or how a character like Sweetmint might view herself because she’s been socialized around this racism. But as it was, it was a decent way of showing how racism could manifest in a speculative setting.

However, the Invisibles concept is where my praise for This Great Hemisphere ends. One of my biggest issues with this novel is that all of the characters were flat, and as a result, I had significant trouble connecting to any of the characters. Sweetmint was the protagonist who we were supposed to root for, but she had no personality outside of being an object of marginalization; I know that she gets beaten up and wants to save her brother, but those aren’t character traits. Strip the plot away, and Sweetmint would be nothing. The same applied to most of the other characters in the novel, who were either hollow caricatures of various kinds (ex. Croger was an eccentric billionaire, the Rainbow Girls were gossipy, catty women), or just not given any personality traits at all. This was most detrimental when it came to Sweetmint’s brother; since we spend the whole novel searching for him, surely we’ll get a taste of what his personality is like, as well as his relationship with Sweetmint, right? Apparently not…once again, he’s just there to move the plot along. This Great Hemisphere could have been a solid novel with the bones that it stood on, but without any substantial characters, it was practically skeletal.

Beyond the Invisibles, there’s almost no worldbuilding, and what’s there makes almost no sense. It’s the 26th century, and we’re in…a forest of some sort. Climate change has affected…something, but Askaripour refuses to tell you what. There aren’t any major technological innovations in 500 years, seemingly—and even if this were some kind of society where everybody had become luddites for whatever reason, that’s not explained either! Chief Architect Croger is the one responsible for molding modern society into what it is, but do we know how? Also no. There’s a government, and it’s bad, and they have…elections? That’s about all I know. There’s just absolutely no scaffolding for any of the worldbuilding, nor is there context for it. If Askaripour hadn’t said anything about the time period, I fully would’ve assumed that this was set, at the furthest, at the end of the 21st century. If This Great Hemisphere had been set in a climate-ravaged 2080’s, or something, half of these problems wouldn’t even exist—but it would still take at least some modicum of effort to convince us that this was set past 2024. It was just blatantly clear that Askaripour did very little work to make his speculative fiction truly speculative—it felt so modern, and that continued negligence for the worldbuilding made suspending my disbelief exceedingly difficult.

I’m always wary of male authors writing from the perspective of female characters, and This Great Hemisphere reminded me of why I have those fears in the first place. Don’t worry—we don’t get into “her boobs breasted boobily” territory here, but it’s not great, either. The bar is in the Mariana Trench, but Askaripour is still somewhere in the twilight zone at best. Already, the characters were developed poorly and presented little opportunity to get attached, so Sweetmint, regardless of gender, was not a compelling character. But her gender factored greatly into the discrimination in this novel, which is where it gets messy. There are so many scenes with her being beaten up, groped, and otherwise abused, which bordered on gratuitous. And yes, This Great Hemisphere is about a (somewhat) fictional kind of discrimination, but Askaripour didn’t seem to reflect at all about how gender would intersect with this fictional marginalization. Instead, we got page after page of Sweetmint facing gender-based violence with no nuanced reflection on it. It just rubbed me the wrong way that these things were being done so thoughtlessly to a female character. It wasn’t gratuitous enough to be torture porn, but it came close to it. In addition, when the female characters weren’t underdeveloped entirely, they felt rather shallow; I did appreciate that Askaripour kind of humanized a few of the Rainbow Girls, but they were very much a caricature of gossiping, oversexualized women in the end. Again! He could’ve made some very potent commentary on that, but no, apparently this novel needed the same caricature in every color of the rainbow…for some reason.

All in all, a speculative dystopia that talked the talk in terms of its themes and metaphors, but largely failed to walk the walk and follow through on its own ideas. 2.5 stars.

This Great Hemisphere is a standalone, but Mateo Askaripour is also the author of Black Buck.

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 Books

The Bookish Mutant’s Books for Black History Month (2026 Edition)

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Wednesday, bibliophiles!

Here in the U.S., February is Black History Month! Another year, another post where I lament the erasure of history by the Trump administration. There’s no end to the irony of this erasure when our country was quite literally built off of the labor of enslaved peoples. This is just somebody’s blog and not some grand antifascist statement, but I can’t help but think that education, and reading in particular, is one of the best ways to combat the government’s erasure of the contributions of Black people in the U.S. And if my post gets just one person who didn’t know about our history to look further, then I feel like I’ve done something good.

This year, I’ve included nonfiction as well as fiction, many of them concerning the often glossed-over history of Black people in this country. But during any month celebrating marginalized people—and every month in the year—it’s so important to go looking for the history that your school, your government, or your peers have left behind. Black people always have been, always are, and always will be an integral part of United States history, from its literary tradition to its very foundation. Denying this is monstrous, and sets a dangerous precedent for the national perception of our country. So, as with every post like this I make: go out and read books by Black authors, and educate yourself about Black history in February and every month!

Below are some links to Instagram, but they provide resources for Black History Month—and every month!

For my lists from previous years, click below: 

NOTE: not all of these books strictly adhere to the genres that I placed them in; a lot of them are fairly genre-bending, especially in the two genre fiction categories. It just goes to show how much of a creative bunch these authors are—we’ve got a lot of authors here who break and bend the rules of fantasy and sci-fi. Also, just for new readers—the “YA” on the cover image is a bit of a misnomer, but once again, I’m too lazy to make a new graphic for it and there’s only so much space for my WordPress media.

Let’s begin, shall we?

THE BOOKISH MUTANT’S BOOKS FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH (2025 EDITION)

FANTASY:

*NOTE: this novel is set in the Raybearer universe, but is a companion novel that can be understood without reading the original duology.

SCIENCE FICTION:

REALISTIC FICTION/MYSTERY/THRILLER:

NONFICTION:

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

Today’s song:

That’s it for this recommendations list! 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 (1/6/26) – The Broposal

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I’ve been a fan of Sonora Reyes’s YA novels ever since The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School came out back in 2022. So when I found out that they’d written their adult debut last year, I was excited to see if their keen eye for emotional resonance still rang true. Unfortunately, this may be Reyes’s first miss—maybe they’ll be able to write a better adult novel in the future, but The Broposal proved that the transition from age groups was far from smooth.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Broposal – Sonora Reyes

Alejandro and Kenny are roommates—nothing more, as far as they’re concerned. But Alejandro is in a tight spot: as an undocumented immigrant, the easiest way for him to get a green card is to get married to an American citizen, and Kenny may be the perfect candidate. Their plan is foolproof—get married, get Alejandro’s green card, and their families will be none the wiser that they aren’t actually in love. Feelings won’t be a problem, because they don’t have any for each other, right? But as they get deeper into their plan, Alejandro and Kenny realize that this proposal is more than fake—and that they’re certainly more than bros.

TW/CW: racism, racial profiling/threat of deportation/ICE, sexual content, homophobia, biphobia, abortion, abuse, loss of loved ones

With a heavy heart, I’ll have to declare The Broposal Sonora Reyes’s first real miss. They’ve had such an excellent run of YA novels, it’s such a shame! I’m not sure if it’s just the transition from YA to Adult that got them, but after The Broposal, I feel like they might be better off just sticking to YA. With a skewed perception of what “adult” entails and a romance I couldn’t fully buy, The Broposal stumbled considerably on its way to making a convincing love story.

Although my overall experience with The Broposal was a disappointment, there were a handful of aspects about it that I liked. I loved that both of the leads were Latine, and Reyes did an excellent job of handling the subject of being undocumented and the fear and racial profiling that comes along with it. I haven’t read a ton of novels that talk about being undocumented and the fear of deportation, and Reyes handled this very sensitively. The queer and neurodivergent representation was also excellent, and the depiction of bisexuality and biphobia felt very close to home. The character writing was decent as well, though not as strong as some of their other novels—Jackie in particular was exceptionally hateable, even if she was comically so.

Some authors are easily able to make the leap from writing for teens to writing for adults, but unfortunately, Sonora Reyes does not seem to be one of them. The most common issue I see in authors who fail to bridge the gap is that they overcompensate; Now that it’s an Adult™️ novel, they dial the swearing and sexual content up to 100, when most adult novels don’t even reach that threshold. While I’m glad that The Broposal was so open about sexual content and exploring kink, it was so dramatic that it felt like it was included just so that the “adult” label could be slapped on. Take that away, and all of the characters were just teenagers in adult bodies. Their dialogue was childish, as were some of their romantic conflicts; increasing the swearing and not the maturity doesn’t automatically make for an adult character. I had a difficult time believing that these characters were adults with jobs—they read more like hormonal high schoolers.

The main obstacle in the way of Han and Kenny was that they didn’t actually have feelings for each other, even though they were faking a marriage proposal. However, throughout The Broposal, I could never buy that all the way. Of course, the whole novel hinges on them eventually falling in love, but even then, it seemed like they had romantic feelings for each other from the start. They already acted like they were in love, even when they weren’t. Aside from the sexual aspect and a handful of unsaid things, Han and Kenny’s behaviors towards each other hardly changed at all, which killed all of the appeal of their slow-burn romance for me. After a certain point, the only thing that changed was the sex and labeling themselves as “in love.”

Yet what may have hampered The Broposal the most was that everything—and I mean everything—was piled into the third act. It was so clear that Reyes didn’t know how to create conflict beyond what was already present, so they just threw every possible kind of conflict at the wall. As if the threat of Han being deported and Jackie being pregnant with Kenny’s baby wasn’t enough, we get all of the following: Jackie threatens to call ICE on Han, Han’s mom dies, Han gets fired, and Kenny almost gets fired too. It all happened in such quick succession that it became clear as day how shoehorned in it all was. The real kicker was that almost all of it got solved in an instant: Jackie gets an abortion, they get their boss fired for discrimination, and Han wasn’t even that close with his mom anyway and is able to grieve for a conveniently short amount of page time. It reeks of what I’m now calling Hacks syndrome: they set up conflict that feels like it’ll dramatically alter the outcome of the novel, but it all gets solved within a few pages. With so much unnecessary conflict that was solved so easily, I found myself losing interest in The Broposal by virtue of knowing that everything would be solved so quickly.

All in all, a romance novel that excelled in representation and character writing, but added too many unnecessary aspects into the third act—a rare miss from Sonora Reyes. 2 stars.

The Broposal is a standalone and Sonora Reyes’s first adult novel. They are also the author of The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School, The Golden Boy’s Guide to Bipolar, and The Luis Ortega Survival Club.

Today’s song:

PETER GABRIEL IS BACK TO SAVE 2026!! REJOICE

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!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (10/14/25) – Scout’s Honor

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

To close out Latine Heritage Month, here’s a novel from an author I haven’t read in years! I’d totally forgotten about Lily Anderson since high school. I remember liking Undead Girl Gang a lot when I was younger, so I figured I might give her (somewhat) newer novel a chance. Scout’s Honor is a novel that leans into both the adventurous and the sensitive, a tale of sisterhood, coming of age, and carnivorous interdimensional monsters.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Scout’s Honor – Lily Anderson

Prue wants nothing to do with her family legacy. A third-generation Ladybird Scout, she is part of an elite circle of women trained to hunt Mulligrubs, interdimensional beasts who feed off of the emotions of humans—and sometimes their flesh, when they get hungry enough. After her friend was killed in a deadly Mulligrub attack, Prue swore off the Ladybird Scouts for good. But when a new crisis pulls her back into the fray, Prue must decide if her legacy is worth preserving—or if she needs to go her own way.

TW/CW: PTSD themes, panic attacks, violence, gore, loss of a loved one

Maybe the real Root is the friends we made along the way, amirite?

Though I can’t speak to the accuracy of the representation (Prue has PTSD), Scout’s Honor had such a deeply sensitive depiction of trauma. If the acknowledgements are anything to go by, Anderson drew a hefty amount of it from personal experience, and that authenticity shone through emotionally on the page. Narratively, you’re only fed breadcrumbs of Prue’s trauma (until you aren’t), but I feel like it mirrored Prue’s difficulties with confronting her past. There’s a lot of detail afforded to how she experiences panic attacks and how her trauma has manifested in the three years since her trauma began. Beyond that, Prue had such a poignant arc, and so much of it revolved around her trauma; the entire reason she returns to the site of her trauma is to find a way to forget it (to physically remove her ability to See the Mulligrubs via a special tea), and yet it shows her that no matter what, she can never forget the past: the only way to truly heal is not to easily overcome it, but to face it. It was such a poignant take on trauma and healing, so kudos to Anderson for that!

I also loved how Scout’s Honor tackled its themes of sisterhood! In an organization like the Ladybird Scouts, where a value like sisterhood is prized above all else, it’s bound to be perverted; any value put on that high of a pedestal is bound to be used for ill intent, which it often is in this novel—case in point with Faithlynn. But I loved how Anderson talked about what sisterhood really is—uplifting difference yet embracing commonality, and truly helping each other when we’re down. There’s Faithlynn’s sisterhood, which is just a word she can toss around while putting down the other girls around her, and there’s Prue’s sisterhood, who accepts the less conventional Ladybird Scouts like Sasha and Avi into the fold and celebrates their individual strengths in order to solve the problems throughout the novel. It’s a heartwarming exploration of the topic and a lovely depiction of how it can so easily be twisted—and an indictment of any woman whose path to success is only built on putting other women down (and in the path of danger).

For the most part, the world of Scout’s Honor was a treat! Though the worldbuilding wasn’t anything groundbreaking, there was so much surrounding the lore and the structure of the Ladybird Scouts that I loved dissecting and exploring. Anderson really nailed all of the idiosyncrasies and minute rules of this organization, from their front in the real world to the work they did behind closed doors. Anderson truly nailed the feeling of being a part of a tight-knit, insular community sworn to secrecy—there were so many laws and bylaws that had to be dodged, almost as much as the Mulligrubs, throughout the novel. Although I enjoyed the classifications of all the different Mulligrubs, I would have liked some more explanation as to how they came to Earth in the first place, and exactly what kind of dimension we’re talking about when Anderson calls them “interdimensional,” but that’s more of a me thing—the novel doesn’t necessarily need it since the worldbuilding of the primary location is already well-established.

My main issue with Scout’s Honor, however, lay in the pacing. Despite most of the emotional sections of the novel landing appropriately, Anderson didn’t seem to know how much time to allocate to certain scenes, which ended up making the pacing quite lopsided. Until the climax, it also lessened the stakes quite a bit; even though the mulligrubs are a very real threat in this universe, almost all of the battle scenes were over in what felt like the blink of an eye. If not for Prue’s trauma surrounding them, I wouldn’t have felt the tangible threat of them at all—aside from the aftermath, the characters seemed to deal with the Mulligrubs, no matter the size or strength, like that. On the flip side, although I love some character building, there were long stretches when not a ton happened, and hardly any of it serviced the plot or character development—there were just long stretches of banter that didn’t show anything that hadn’t already been established. Anderson is a strong writer for the most part, but the pacing dragged Scout’s Honor down for sure. It was really the only thing keeping me from rating it the full 4 stars.

All in all, a novel brimming with heart and heinous monsters, let down by pacing but lifted up by its depictions of trauma and sisterhood. 3.75 stars, rounded up to 4!

Scout’s Honor is a standalone, but Lily Anderson is also the author of The Only Thing Worse Than Me is You series (The Only Thing Worse Than Me is You and Not Now, Not Ever), Undead Girl Gang, The Throwback List, Killer House Party, and several other novels for teens and adults. She has also contributed to the YA anthologies The (Other) F Word: A Celebration of the Fat and Fierce, That Way Madness Lies: 15 of Shakespeare’s Most Notable Works Reimagined and All Signs Point to Yes.

Today’s song:

been unhealthily obsessed w this for the past few days…

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