Tag: lgbtq

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Review

“The Paradox Paradox”

Daniel Hardcastle

This… is one of the greatest books I have ever read. I’ll tackle the easy thing first: the comedy is sublime. Not surprising, given that Hardcastle is one of my favorite YouTubers, and has been for checks notes over a decade. He’s got this ‘entertaining people’ thing down.

Next easiest to tackle: the cast and setting. The cast is delightful, a wonderfully diverse mix of species, and watching them all interact is an absolute delight. Everyone is likable, everyone has a fascinating backstory, every last one of them I want more of. And the setting is absolutely gorgeous; it has that Douglas Adams feel of some of the details being played purely for comedy, but every last one of them still works. Like, towards the end, there’s a throwaway line about banana peels having been re-engineered to be edible centuries ago, and it’s meant as a joke about the fact that they still taste like the wrong kind of banana the same way all fake banana stuff does, but that works. Centuries of scientific progress, and of course we’d have some little detail like that that we’d hang on to for the sake of nostalgia rather than sense. The future won’t be shiny and perfect, but it will be shiny, and full of interesting decisions that people have made because they’re still people.

And now, the hardest bit to talk about, particularly without spoiling anything: the time travel. It’s named “The Paradox Paradox,” of course it’s about time travel. But this is, I think, the best-thought-out system of time travel I’ve ever seen. I’m not entirely certain that I’m grasping the whole of it, but it all works. And the way the book is put together makes it work even better – the chapter numbers are chronological, the chapters themselves are not. Because it’s a book about time travel, of course the sequence of events doesn’t follow the calendar! But, beyond that, the chapter numbers don’t match the table of contents. I was reading this on an e-reader, one that shows the chapter title up at the top of each page, and those don’t always align with the actual title card at the beginning of the chapter. You can’t trust the chapter numbers, but they are deeply meaningful. They just might be lying to you. And it is sublime.

I finished this book feeling a sense of awed delight. This is a masterwork, this is one of the greatest things I have ever read. 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

“Hex Americana”

Bree D. Wolf

This is a fun setting – vaguely modern American, but with the addition of a massive variety of magic and magical creatures from folklore. Honestly, I think we should call that kind of thing ‘hex Americana’ in general, it really fits the vibe. The protagonists are a yokai and a ghost, and there’s also appearances by what look to be a wolf man, a Medusa, a cyclops, a mummy, and Baba Yaga. It’s a fun mix!

The actual story I mostly enjoyed – it’s a bit more “high schooler making bad choices” than I tend to prefer, to the point that my reading had a month-long break, but I did enjoy piecing together all the backstory. Definitely worth the read, and hey, I get to support a local author, too! 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

“The Deep and Shining Dark”

Juliet Kemp

This is one of those books that makes me think about hard versus soft magic systems. A hard magic system has strict rules; an extension of the laws of physics. Soft magic systems are a lot looser; the rules are “whatever the plot requires them to be.” Pros and cons to either.

In this case, we have a pretty soft magic system; the only real rule seems to be that you need blood to control magic. With the exception of Marek, a city whose founders negotiated a deal with an angel, and it came to live there, interceding between the people that raw magic, making it a much safer affair overall. And, in true “wisdom of the ancients” style, they were very clever about it, and the deal included things like “you can’t use magic for politics” and “the angel has to keep the good of the city in mind.”

All of which worked quite well as backdrop for what is, essentially, a political intrigue. It may have taken a few hundred years, but no system works perfectly forever. Not without maintenance, at least. Once most people forget why and how the magic works, it gets easy to assume that it works that way because it works that way. You stop thinking about it. It becomes a norm.

But, eventually, someone comes along who doesn’t accept the norm. Who thinks, well, this rule seems breakable. Nobody’s actively enforcing it anymore.

I don’t think this book was meant to be quite as topical to politics as it felt, given that perspective, but it worked out well. Made for a very interesting read overall, and I can definitely recommend it. 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

“A Feast for Flies”

Leigh Harlen

This was chaotic and fun to read; it did a pretty good job of capturing the feeling of being in over your head, one normal person trying not to be squished by the movements of the movers and shakers of the world. A mind-reader, forced to work for the police, hating her job but legally not allowed to leave it. Bea, the support dog, was a fun concept—there’s a passing reference to people with less sci-fi reasons for needing a support animal getting by with robots, but here, the disability is “can constantly hear the thoughts and feelings of people around her,” and being in contact with the dog (or through the conductive leash) dampens all of that.

The mind reading was done fairly well, I thought, and just different enough in the details that it felt interesting but still easy to follow. A fun, quick 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

“Little Nothing”

Dee Holloway

I didn’t quite click with this one. The closest I got was with the “little nothings,” the small pieces of magic, and even there, I wanted it to be a bit more. I want magic that actually feels like magic, not magic that feels like someone believing in themselves by telling a story in their head that it’s magic. The biggest ‘little nothing,’ as it’s referred to, that appears in this book is someone getting themselves untied… and the way they do that spell is to spend an hour slowly fidgeting with the rope until the motion and them bleeding on the rope from the sores on their wrists loosen it enough that they can pull the knot the rest of the way undone. The spellwork is simultaneously treated as “enough of a threat that they have to be tied down so they can’t move their hands” and also “basically a form of self-affirmation” and it just bugged me.

Complaints about magic aside, it was an interesting read—I’ve never been much for Civil War-era stuff, so the perspective of people loyal to the Union, living in Florida, in the lead-up to the actual declaration of the Confederacy, was a new perspective to me. Worth it for that, I suppose, though the concept of “what if Florida had carnivorous swimming horses in addition to the alligators” was a bit more fun of a twist. 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

“Rabbits of the Apocalypse”

Benny Lawrence

I’m kinda amazed by how much I enjoyed this book, because it’s a hodgepodge of a bunch of things I really don’t like. It’s post-apocalyptic, for god’s sake! And not even a particularly hopeful post-apocalyptic, it’s a “and things are still getting worse!” post-apocalyptic. Gross.

I suppose what shone was the characters—I was interested in all of them, in their relationships. Which, again, kinda surprising, because they’re basically all terrible. Hell, one of the main characters in this spends a whole lot of time justifying their actions, and even towards the end where they’re starting to crack and admit that the Big Bad they work for is, in fact, not the good guys… they never address the fact that said Big Bad is a slave empire. Like, c’mon. Have some self-awareness.

I dunno, though. Like I said, I did enjoy reading it—fairly well-written, and the banter really brought a lot of joy to it. If you’re into… Fallout, but as a sapphic romance(?), and a little bit of X-Men, then this might be the book for you. Worth a shot, anyways.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

“Champion of the Scarlet Wolf, Book 2”

Ginn Hale

As promised, I went right into reading the second book.1 And I quite enjoyed it, though admittedly not as much as I did the first. I think part of my issue was that this seems to be an advance reader copy or something — not the final edition, is all. There’s a few clear errors that a final editing pass should’ve caught.2

That said, I did enjoy the read. I was worried that it was going to do the Syfy thing, and try to continue escalating, but it didn’t — the scope stayed “well, we’re all gonna die, but the world will go on.” Nice to have a sort of series-scale denouement like that, after the first book featured “well, we’re all gonna die, and then also this thing might end the world after that.”

The other thing this reminded me of was Diana Wynne Jones. It had that same kind of “slow build right up until everything comes together at once” feeling; in the same way that I spend the first half of the book going “I dunno, I don’t think this is really capturing me as much as I’d like it to…” and then suddenly I’m forgetting to eat because I can’t put the book down that long. It wound up being fun, and tying up some of the remaining threads from the first book pretty well, so I appreciated that. A good read! Start with Book 1, but then give it a go.3

  1. At some point in the book I thought “is there going to be a third?” and found out that this is, in fact, the fourth book in the series — evidently a great deal of the Mysterious Backstory I’d been piecing together as I read was just the events of the first two books. Whoops, guess I was reading on challenge mode. That said, I think it held up quite well as its own little duology! ↩
  2. And I mean obvious stuff like a word that was meant to be replaced still being there. The subtler things, like a character’s name being spelled differently, are harder to notice if you haven’t just read the first one. And, presumably, particularly if you didn’t spend every appearance by that character in the first book thinking about “her name isn’t ‘Fleur’ like from Harry Potter, it’s ‘Fluer’” so that it suddenly becoming ‘Fleur’ really stands out. ↩
  3. 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

“Champion of the Scarlet Wolf, Book 1”

Ginn Hale

I had so much more fun reading this than I expected to. A great deal of giving me exactly what I wanted in the most fun way possible. So much mysterious backstory to piece together! Two missing princes! Quests within quests. A character whose two intertwined emotional arcs are “working through internalized homophobia” and “dealing with PTSD that they’ve spent a lifetime ignoring.” And a truly wonderful “the audience knows but the character doesn’t” scene featuring a shapeshifter who’d been stuck in animal form, and a man in the midst of a severe fever waking up to a twink in his bed wearing nothing but the collar he’d hand-made for the dog he rescued a couple weeks ago. Exactly as hilarious a reveal as I wanted that to be. Absolutely perfect.

The magic system here feels cobbled together out of various other things—there’s hints of Tolkein-style “the magic is going out of the world,” but it feels more like a “… because we’ve deliberately forgotten how to do the really big stuff” in a way that makes the world feel like it has lots and lots of history to dig into. The magic users all at least a little bit know about the other types of magic, some kind of passing familiarity, but there are, indeed, at least three distinct styles that we see. And it feels like they all fit together, like they’re all expressions of the same fundamental thing—reminiscent of the Thirteenth Child series, in that way.1

An absolute delight of a read; I’m about to dive into the second book, because things aren’t neatly tied up at all here at the end, and I’m excited to find out where it goes. Check it out!2

  1. Having just gone to look for a link, it would seem that I’ve never written up a review of those books… so I suppose I now have an excuse to do a reread. ↩
  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

“We’re Here”

edited by L.D. Lewis & Charles Payseur

Anthologies are always an interesting thing to read; they offer more variability than a single book by a single author, and tend to be a lot easier to read in bursts. This one made for some great vacation reading — get through one story, go for a dip in the pool, read another while drying off in the sun.1 That said, it’s not a guarantee it’ll be good; sometimes the focus area is too depressing, or the editors made a succession of bad choices.

This, delightfully, was not one of those. “Queer speculative fiction” is a fairly safe topic area to begin with, as it basically pins a single character trait of one or more characters in the story, and a delightfully diverse character trait it is. The title, as well, adds a certain amount of hopeful tinge to it, and the stories almost universally delivered on that.

Favorites include:

  • A rural Oregonian woman having a big fight with her ex-girlfriend, exclusively in the form of flower language.
  • A woman trapped in a three-day time loop before the space station she’s on explodes, using it to sample every restaurant the station has to offer.
  • A lesbian couple running a magic shop together. The story opens with them having a charcuterie board for dinner, and the vibes stay immaculate from there on out; I want to read an entire series of this one.
  • A POV story of the protagonist in a videogame, learning some things about themselves when the player installs a mod.

This collection was a delight; for any one of the above stories, I’d call it worth it, and it includes all of them and more. Give it a go!2

  1. And getting a little sunburned, but oh well. ↩
  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

“Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea”

Sarah Pinsker

Absolutely a mixed bag in the way that only an anthology can be. There’s some stories in here that I really didn’t like—I hated “Our Lady of the Open Road,” it just felt crushingly depressing all the way through.

And then there’s some that I really liked. The final story, “And Then There Were (N-One),” was absolutely masterful: a murder mystery set at an interdimensional continuum for various iterations of one person. Now that is a concept!

Weirdly, the ones that I quite liked were the ones about grief. “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” and “The Narwhal” were both really touching pieces about loss. “Remembery Day” was beautiful and aching and sad. And I loved it. Usually I don’t; usually I want upbeat things to read. But it worked.

The good outweighed the bad, here; the first couple pieces I didn’t at all enjoy, so stick with it past those, see how you feel about the later ones.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

“House of Gold”

C.T. Rwizi

I quite liked this—the three arcs it’s split into each feel different in a fun way, and expand on the universe more.1 Bouncing back and forth between two viewpoint characters also worked very well, and the fact that both of them are the “Proxies”, supporting their “Primes”, the ones who are very clearly driving the action most of the way through, made it all the more interesting. It captures a little bit of that space opera “there’s a lot of big things happening in the background” feeling, whilst staying very close to the action.

Overall, I enjoyed the heck out of this one; it’s significantly longer than my last couple reads, but that didn’t stop me from plowing through it in a single day. Definitely a page-turner. Check it out.2

  1. I’m quite curious if this counts as taking place in the same universe as Scarlett Odyssey – it seems very possible, the magic system in that feels very “sufficiently advanced technology. ↩
  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

“Through the Doors of Oblivion”

Michael G. Williams

This was a fun little novella. Emperor Norton is such a character that he feels like he should be completely fictional, but is, in fact, an actual historical figure. And Williams did a good job of working around my issue with historical fiction—the rule to time travel appears to be “you can’t change what’s in the historical record,” but thanks to, y’know, there not being cameras around all the time in 1910, it’s easy to fudge things. Steal an artifact from the past? No worries, the building burned down shortly afterwards, destroying all the evidence.

It’s a fun and hopeful little story, I quite liked it. Give it a go.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

“The Bruising of Qilwa”

Naseem Jamnia

A quick read, but a very enjoyable one. It’s a bit of a medical mystery, but mostly what it’s about is the experience of being… well, going into the author’s note at the end, of being Persian. Of being an oppressed minority… whilst also being aware that your people were once the oppressors.

The linguistics and magic were both very interesting, and I found all the characters to be well-developed. Definitely worth the 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

“The Dragon Eater”

J. Scott Coatsworth

The ‘jumping the shark’ moment for this book was in the appearance of one of the Pern books in-universe. A bit on the nose to have your “fantasy setting, but it’s actually another planet that got colonized by humans before the big civilization collapsed” book feature, as one of the Ancient Artifacts… a book about the exact same concept. In this case, the threat is still unknown, but we do get to see it, and it’s a bit more… active than thread.

That said, I did really enjoy the setting; I’m a firm believer in the whole “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” thing, and dropping the general level of technology available to people lowers the threshold on “sufficiently advanced” enough to make it more recognizable.

It also helps that the love arc here was just… hilarious. I quite liked all the characters, and seeing them interact, but the fact that there’s at least one love triangle, one member of whom keeps thinking about jumping ship to a different love triangle, makes it fun.

Overall, I quite enjoyed the book; my main complaint is that it’s an entire book’s worth of setup, and the payoff is going to happen in, presumably, the third book of the trilogy. I’d rather one long book to three medium-short ones. Still, a fun little fantasy/science fiction thing, worth a try.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

“Uncommon Charm”

Emily Bergslien, Kat Weaver

I might have to go back and reread the first chapter now that I’ve finished this, just so I can understand what all was going on. The point-of-view protagonist spends that whole time talking a mile a minute, and there’s so much background that you don’t know yet that it’s rather overwhelming. Though, given that it’s a scene of someone being dropped off for a new apprenticeship, feeling overwhelmed is probably about right.

There’s a definite mystery vibe to this one, though it’s a cold case, as well as something of a coming-of-age. Really, quite a lot to shove into this short a book. It was an interesting read, though, and at least one reveal had me going back like “oh, that’s what that was about! oh! oh.” 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. ↩