Tag: fiction

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Review

“Greylady”

Peter Morwood

I went into this expecting it to feel more like a Diane Duane novel, which entirely wasn’t the case. (For context, they’re married—that wasn’t an entirely random thought to have.) Instead, it felt like a storyteller; the plot didn’t quite line up in the way I expect from a novel, but I think it works fairly well as a story being told to a great hall full of revelers.

There’s a couple odd spots, still—near the beginning, a couple chapters from a different character’s perspective, and I kept expecting to go back to them, but they never reappeared. And, towards the end, a skip forward in time that feels like it’s glossing over a lot of things that happened. This is listed as “Book 1” in the series, but I feel like, in the interest of closure, the last chapter was actually borrowed from the end of Book 2 instead.

Those issues aside, I quite enjoyed the book. The prose flows in a way that, again, feels like a story teller in a way; there’s a rhythm to it throughout. I’m still a bit unclear on the system of magic—there’s a distinction between sorcerers and wizards, but I still couldn’t tell you which was which—but that feels like just a mixing of words, and the actual system feels reasonably clear.1 And I appreciated that, while it doesn’t wrap up every thread, and actually specifically starts up some new ones at the end, it still came with enough of a sense of closure on the story that it felt complete. It’s the start of a series, but I don’t feel cheated out of anything by having only read the first one so far.

All in all, this was a good read, and a fairly approachable fantasy novel. Give it a read.2

  1. Which, again, very different from Duane’s works—in here, it’s clearly a ‘soft magic’ system, whereas the Young Wizards series has a fairly hard magic system, with very clear rules and functionality… that can still occasionally bend for the betterment of the plot. But then, in-universe, that kind of thing still makes sense, because the reader isn’t the only outside force looking in, and the others are able to influence things more directly. ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Extraordinaries”

TJ Klune

Starting with an excerpt from the egregious self-insert fanfic that your protagonist is writing sure is a powerful opening. Imagine getting hit by a fully-loaded semi truck, carrying exclusively cringe. A bold statement, which nearly got me to put the book back down again; my high school experience was bad enough on its own, and I’ve never felt the need to relive it while adding extra awkwardness.

That said, I managed to convince myself to power through, and I’m glad I did. I have to give bonus points to whoever picked the tagline on the cover—“Some people are extraordinary. Some are just extra.”—because it really explains what the protagonist is like. He’s extra. He’s also the most authentically high school character I’ve read in a while, because oh my god is he an idiot. Most of the plot of the book is “him failing to notice very obvious things, and coming up with incredibly stupid plans.”

What makes the book is his friends. Gibby is positively delightful—she spends most of the book, fully in the know on everyone’s secrets, and mostly using that to laugh at everyone instead of actually helping. A quote:

“Yes,” Gibby breathed. “Yes to this. Yes to all of it. Oh my god, yes. This is so stupid. I can’t wait. White people are freaky.”

She’s living her best life.

The other thing that kept me interested in the book was that I couldn’t quite figure out all the secret identities. There’s just enough twisting to keep you wondering up until the book decides it’s time for you to know, and while it was fun to sit there in the knowledge of how well I’d narrowed down the pool of options while Nick—the protagonist—hadn’t actually figured out there was a pool of options, it was also fun to be unsure.

I enjoyed the heck out of this book. It took me a bit to get into it, because wow is the poorly-written fanfic at the start a tough sell, but once it got its hooks in I couldn’t put it down. Give it a read.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“In Deeper Waters”

F.T. Lukens

I picked this book up from a Pride shelf at a used bookstore—and yes, that’s a bit of a peek into how much of a book backlog1 I have at any given time, given that this is getting published a month before Pride. And really, I grabbed it because it looked kinda cheesy.

And hey, guess what, it kinda was! But in a way that’s exactly what I wanted from it, exactly what I’d hoped it would be. It’s a cheesy little YA romance novel, with a bunch of high fantasy going on as the backdrop, and I’m so, so glad that things like this exist. Because boy, am I ever tired of the plot of an LGBTQ novel being that They Are LGBTQ. Once or twice, that’s an okay plot, but after that, it’s just repetitive. In this, it’s not at all a thing; from the beginning, Tal’s big brother is absolutely accepting of his bisexuality. The only way it appears at all is that it gives him a broader range of options to embarrass his little brother with by asking if they’re his type.

There’s a post somewhere out there where somebody rips into homophobia in fantasy and science fiction. The gist of it is, ‘you can imagine {insert fantasy trope} but you can’t imagine people not being assholes?’

That’s what this is. Someone said “y’know what, I’m making an entirely fictional setting. Why would I bring that aspect of reality into it? How would that make the story better?”

The cover art is very pastel, and so is the book. For all that there is an actual plot to it, I came to the end feeling like I’d had a hug. This book is kind. I loved it. Go read it.2

  1. A booklog, if you will. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Lessons in Chemistry”

Bonnie Garmus

I’m a little tempted to include a chart of my progress in this book over time; talk about a hockey stick.

The first third of the book or so is just brutal. I remember seeing someone online say that they’d just read the book recently and found it a quick, light read, and thinking to myself what the hell book were you reading? Because the first part of the book is anything but light and quick. It’s a litany of all the micro- and macro-aggressions a woman faced in the 1950s, trying to be a chemist. 1 And there’s something of a Murphy’s Law feel to it, too, because not only is she dealing with the rampant sexism, but everything else that can go wrong, does.

I spent the first month of trying to read the book caught up in that. I could only make it through a chapter or two at a time, and then I needed a break; it was just so disheartening, so crushing.2

But roughly a third of the way through, it finally turns a corner, and that’s where I switched from plodding through out of a sense of obligation from highly it was recommended to me to “oh, shoot, I need to put the book down so I can get some sleep tonight.” The light appears at the end of the tunnel, the tragic backstory is established, and now we can get into her actually doing things the way she wants instead of being entirely overpowered.

And from then on out, the book is amazing. It’s full of little bits of comedy that are just perfectly executed; perspective shifts and timeline hops all over and only once was I even briefly confused by the combination. The world is still the same one that gave her the tragic backstory, but now it’s being changed for the better, and it’s a happier timeline than the one we’re in.3

So now, here I am, recommending this book as highly as it was recommended to me. It’s really tough at first, but the payoff is so very worth it. Give it a read.4

  1. Or rather, trying to do her work as a chemist while everyone around her tried to stop her—she absolutely is a chemist, just one facing far more obstacles than anyone else in the building. ↩
  2. And these aren’t long chapters, either. ↩
  3. I mean, I can’t guarantee that the 2023 of her world would be better than ours, but I can’t help but think that a world where the housewives of the 1950s had a robust education in chemistry and feminism courtesy of daytime TV would wind up in a better place than we are now. At very least we’d probably be a few decades ahead on the “stop consuming weird preservatives” thing. ↩
  4. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Vine Witch”

Luanne G. Smith

I feel like I should write an individual recommendation of this book to some of my friends that work in the wine industry. To me, having absorbed a minimum of knowledge of the field via osmosis, it feels like the author knows what she’s talking about.

Something about the scale of this book felt really nice. There’s never a “for the sake of the world!” moment; the biggest thing that can go wrong is a crime goes unpunished and a historic vineyard goes out of business. It’s very personal. And the magic feels the same way—the biggest bit of magic anyone has, even historically, seen was a plague that nearly wiped out all the grapes in the valley. No apocalypse, just a local disaster. Small scale; personal. And it’s neat to see magic used not for magic’s sake, but for the sake of craft—not only the titular vine witch, someone who uses magic to help the vintage, but also bakers and brewers. I like seeing things like this, magic not as a “everything is the same but also magic is there!” but magic properly integrated into the world.

The biggest quibble I have with the book is where that integration broke down. Magic is so much a part of this world that having a character who denies its existence just feels… silly. There’s a whole set of laws! Nobody here is even remotely bothering to deny the existence of magic! It’s not a secret by any stretch, so why is it that the “man of science” must categorically deny magic exists? Really, there should be a whole thaumaturgy department at the university in the big city, studies of how magic integrates with natural law…

But that quibble fades over the course of the story, and I found myself quite enraptured by the end. I suspect this is one of many books I received as a “free with Prime” deal, which is almost certainly no longer on offer, but it’s still worth a read. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Capricious: Gender Diverse Pronouns”

ed. A.C. Buchanan

Like I mentioned in my most recent read of an anthology, I’m used to them being centered around a specific theme. In this case, the theme is pretty easy to see, and also pretty vague, overall—I think the core concept was “at least one person in the story uses pronouns other than he/him/his or she/her/hers.”

Which gave the authors a lot of room to play around, and it wound up being a really cool variety of stories! From distant-future sci-fi to swords and sorcery, there’s some interesting things that happened in here.

The one that stands out the most, that I feel I’m going to have to go back and reread once or twice more to really wrap my mind around it, is the story of someone moving to a new country and learning the new language. At first, the pronoun bit is easy to miss, until it becomes important to the story: their home country—and, more importantly, their native language—doesn’t have gender as a concept. The character mentions a total of 9 pronouns in their language, which I believe are I/me/mine, you/you(?)/yours, and they/them/theirs. Which is, itself, already an interesting concept, but to make it even more so, the new country they’ve come to has at least three genders, and a gendered language to boot, bringing them to a total of 45 pronouns. (I didn’t count all of them, but think of things like, several different versions of the second person!)

It’s a really effective story; none of the three genders aligns with the masculine/feminine that we’re used to, and so, as the reader, I wound up latching on to the protagonist’s genderless way of speaking, because it’s more familiar. And we get to be confused and frustrated with them, because what the hell are these three genders? Why are there so many pronouns? Why does this language gender the word “you,” for crying out loud, obviously the second-person pronoun refers to the person you are speaking to… and, hey, actually, now that we’re thinking about this… why do we apply gender to things it doesn’t need to be applied to? Why is it so important to us?

That’s what made that story, to me, the best out of the anthology. It gave me a new way to look at an issue that, frankly, I thought I already had a reasonable grasp on. There’s absolutely value to that.

And hey, there’s a bunch of other stories in there too! Some of them thought-provoking, some of them fun, some of them heartwarming; as I said, a very impressive variety. I heartily recommend it. Check it out.1

  1. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Augie & the Green Knight”

Zach Weinersmith

Y’know, I can’t say that I’ve ever before read a children’s book that includes a mathematical proof as an appendix. But then, Weinersmith is an interesting writer like that.

The core of the story is an old Arthurian myth, Gawain undertaking a quest that comes down to an exploitation of the knight’s code. There’s a certain amount of adaptation for young audiences possible from that, but where Weinersmith really shone was in splitting the story to also follow the Green Knight. Or rather, to follow Augie as she tries to teach the Green Knight not to, y’know, behead people willy-nilly. A bit difficult an argument to make to someone who, upon being beheaded, waves cheerfully, picks up his head, and reattaches it with about as much effort as one puts into reattaching the head that fell off a snowman.

The writing style actually feels very Pratchettian in style—not just because the footnotes, but because it’s got that same sort of “approachable for kids, with jokes that will make them laugh, but not as hard as they’ll make their parents laugh” thing going on.

This feels like a great book for the folks the age it’s aimed at, and I also enjoyed reading it. (Someone remind me, in a couple years, to get a print copy and give it to some of the young folks in my extended family.) Check it out!1

  1. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Unseen Academicals”

Terry Pratchett

Taking a break from my reading new books to reread a favorite of mine! Some friends of mine took part in a recreational soccer league recently, and watching their games put me in the mood for Unseen Academicals. And, upon finishing the reread, I was surprised to find that I’d never posted a review of it.

As with everything Pratchett wrote, the book is a delight to read, a perfect blend of serious story and characters with comedy. It is, frankly, utterly unsurprising that he was awarded a knighthood for his writing; it’d be a shame if he hadn’t been honored.

The thing that makes Unseen Academicals such a long-standing favorite for me is Nutt. And now, in reading it again, there’s a part of me that doesn’t like how neatly his arc is tied together in the end. It’s hardly realistic—that degree of anxiety doesn’t just go away like that. But then, it’s a work of fiction, and more importantly, it’s telling a story. A story has to have a neat ending, or it won’t feel complete.

Still, though, I’ve always loved the portrayal of his fighting through it. The Sisyphean struggle to be worthy:

“But he makes wonderful candles,” she added quickly. “He’s always making things. It’s as if… worth is something that drains away all the time so you have to keep topping it up.”

I really can’t say how much I adore this book. I’ve given copies of it to people before, and likely will again. Go read it.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories”

A.C. Wise

I continue to like short story collections and anthologies, because there’s less of a sense of obligation to them. In this case, I probably only read 2/3 of the stories—a fair few just didn’t stick as I was starting them, and I thought, oh well, it’s just a few pages to skim past.

Wise’s writing style is distinctly more poetic in character than I tend to go for, and I think that was a lot of what lead me to skip as many of the stories as I did. At least as I was reading, I wasn’t in the headspace to be putting quite that much effort in; maybe this was the wrong book for the moment, but it’s the one I was reading, so.

Even the ones I did read don’t felt like they stuck to my mind super well.1

I did like the note it ended on, though—a weird little high school love story mashed up with a horror movie in a fun way. And it successfully got a song stuck in my head, so that’s something!

At the end, I don’t know that I’d give this book my usual highly-positive “go read it” review; maybe see if your local library has it and come to your own decision?

  1. Admittedly, part of that may be because I finished reading this book after going for a swim, and my brain feels like it’s about 35% chlorine at the moment. ↩
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Review

“H.I.V.E.”

Mark Walden

I started reading this series when I was the actual target age group for it, and sometime in the last few months it popped back into my head. From there, I found out that the final book in the series had been published, and I figured I’d go back through and reread the whole thing, now that it was done, see what it’s like.

Honestly, it stands up pretty well. I still feel like this could be adapted into a movie franchise pretty well—it’s got some of that Harry Potter vibe to it, but for the people who love James Bond rather than people who like general fantasy novel stuff.

What’s nice about the ‘finished series’ part of it is that I feel like most of the plot threads got pulled together very well. Everyone gets closure, everyone you like gets a happy ending. And there’s enough room in the state of things for there to be a spin-off series afterwards, if the author feels like writing more!1

As far as what the series is actually about goes, here’s the tl;dr: the Higher Institute of Villainous Education is a boarding school with a very selective, and mandatory, acceptance rate. From the villainous children of the world, the worst of the worst find themselves snatched up and brought to a sprawling facility carved out of the inside of an active volcano, and taught to be not just better villains, but villains with panache. This is where all the classic Bond villains went to school; there are class sessions on space station logistics, how to choose between sites for your underwater base, and how to effectively monologue while slowly executing the hero.

This series is just fun. It perfectly captures that stylistic aplomb, the undeniable cool of the bad guys in the classic Bond films, and mixes it with the staples of the YA genre better than the “young Bond” series ever managed to.

I wasn’t sure how this reread was going to go, but I’m delighted with the end result. I absolutely recommend these books—at very least, check out the first one and see what you think.2

  1. And, by the way, if Walden ever sees this: give me a sequel about Nigel and Franz falling in love, damn you. That little line in the epilogue, “it’s not just the ladies,” that’s the bare minimum of queer representation possible, and I want more. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Signal Moon”

Kate Quinn

This is one of those stories that, going in, you know is going to hurt. Voice-only time travel does not a happy ending make, especially across 80 years. But it’s still worth reading—it’s quite short and to the point, and very effectively told. Spend an hour being sad.1

  1. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses”

Diane Duane

I picked this up for a reread as a break from my “read all the ebooks I’ve got” project, and upon finishing it was surprised to find that I’d never written a review. Well, no time like the present to correct that!

In short, I adore this book. It’s a truly wonderful piece of alternate-history fiction, and the way that’s expressed is done so very perfectly. I’ve got the revised edition, which includes at the end some of the author’s notes about the differences between the worlds it takes place in and ours—and yes, worlds, plural, one of the divergences is the discovery of interdimensional travel, but it’s clearly stated that we’re due to figure that out soon. But even without that, it feels like if you were given the chance to ask Duane about anything in here, pull at any of the strings, she’d have a bunch of notes already prepared. My favorite moment of this is a couple words in passing, where the characters are finally shocked enough by something to say it full out, and suddenly their previous swear of “Suz!” makes more sense: “Suzanne H. Christ!”

Beyond that, the story is weird and fun, and the whole ‘mix of universes’ thing, with the politics that comes from having all these different timelines coming together, makes for a fascinating setting. And, of course, I absolutely love any book that showcases great friendships, and doesn’t fall over itself trying to shoehorn in a love story.1

Overall, this book is a delight, and I heartily recommend it. Pick it up directly from the author’s ebook store, and browse around while you’re there—I love everything of hers that I’ve ever read.2

  1. It was, apparently, a common complaint with the earlier edition that the cover art and title made it sound like a romance novel; I assure you, a romance novel it is not. You’re welcome to read it as if it is one, though, and I bet you’ll find your expectations subverted in a very fun way! ↩
  2. Citation: I’ve got a quote from one of her books as a tattoo. ↩
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Review

“Venom and Vanilla”

Shannon Mayer

I picked this at random out of the pile of unread books on my Kindle, and it lined up oddly well with the last book I read, though in a way that gave me mental whiplash. Where Song of Achilles was a powerful and emotional read, Venom and Vanilla was just kinda silly and fun. It feels like an action-adventure novel written in the style of a pulp-paperback romance.

I found the protagonist a bit irritating at times—her background was “escaped from a religious cult,” and I do get that part of the story arc for her is meant to be getting over the leftover indoctrination from that. Except the escape part happened like a decade gone, and the interim, she was a small business owner in Seattle; there’s a certain amount of naïveté that I just can’t really believe someone would hold on to through that.

Similarly, the worldbuilding has a lot of characteristics that remind me of Teen Wolf fanfiction. It’s an interesting concept, and fun to play around in, but if you try to examine it closely, it gets really hard to figure out the intervening steps between “the world as it really was 20 years ago” and “the world as it is in this book, having had One Big Thing change.” Do I believe that the reveal of the existence of supernatural creatures would trigger massive waves of xenophobia, especially in the US? Yes! No suspension of disbelief required. Do I believe that we’d then built a 40-foot concrete wall the entire length of the US-Canada border, move all the humans out of Canada, and start dumping every supernatural we could find onto the Canadian side? No, sorry, I’m actually not capable of suspending my disbelief enough to get past the idea of the US Congress trying to sell that concept to the average Québécois. Much less the Canadian Parliament as a whole.

For my overall opinion, I’m calling back to the first paragraph I wrote: it’s silly and fun. I don’t know that I’d recommend actually spending money on this, but you could maybe find a copy in the library and give it a go.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Song of Achilles”

Madeline Miller

It may be possible to read this book without knowing how the story has to end. I suspect it’s not possible for anyone raised in the global West, and even outside of that, by the time you know enough English to read this book, you’ve probably picked up enough cultural background knowledge to have a good idea. The phrase “Achilles heel” isn’t exactly uncommon.

With that foreknowledge, the entire novel feels like a growing weight, the crushing inevitability of that end coming towards you. It’s the sound of rushing water as your paddle-less boat approaches the falls; the growing vibration of the rails you’re tied to as the train approaches.

The rending heartbreak of one of the most beautiful love stories I can remember ever reading. So much of this stories is about Achilles and Patroclus growing up together and falling in love. Their first kiss is another inevitability by the time it arrives, something you’ve been waiting for for what feels like months—that just-out-of-reach realization, the word hovering on the tip of your tongue, and then the satisfaction of grasping it.

Truth be told, I haven’t finished the book yet. I’m nearly to the end, and as I’ve done many times while reading, I have to take a break. Set it down, and give myself time to process the feeling of grief coming in all out of order.

This may be one of the greatest books I have ever read. For someone who grew up reading Greek mythology, it was entirely predictable, and yet so very new. A breath of fresh air, and the pounding weight of a waterfall, crushing you down into the deep, cold water. I cannot recommend it highly enough; please, read it.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Dark Matter”

Blake Crouch

A friend of mine gave me this book and told me I have to read it. Which was a good push to have, because if I hadn’t had that in the back of my head, I don’t think I would’ve stuck it through. The whole first half of the book is… not all that interesting. It’s a generic sci-fi trope (oh, what’s that, there’s infinite realities, and each choice we make splits off into two or more??? unprecedented) and a protagonist who takes way too long to figure out what’s going on. (And, frankly, he never really figures much out until the end, and even then it feels like he’s still running behind, but at least by then it was somewhat understandable.)

Really, it just felt like it spent entirely too long setting up the premise. Which is probably useful for a broader audience, but in that regard I’m the wrong person to read it—as is, really, anyone who’s watched Rick and Morty.

But if you stick with it, it actually does a good job of exploring the concept in a new way. One that even the aforementioned Rick and Morty hasn’t delved into. The narcissism of small differences, the sheer overwhelming number of uncanny valleys you can have in an infinite multiverse. And the issues that arise when those infinitely-splitting choices keep infinitely splitting.

So, overall, I found myself quite enjoying the book. It’s not at all hard sci-fi, and sitting here looking at the cover, the little “a novel” down in the corner is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It’s far more about the characters than it is about the adventure. If that sounds interesting to you, check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩