Eve

Whatcha reading follow on/update

I finished the rook and ruin trilogy. Very fun! I like those books a lot. Melissa caruso definitely has a type for her love interests (snarky but sad men with long hair). In both trilogies the main relationship is het but with the secondary romance being a wlw one. Which the cynical part of me says is a handy way to cater to the biggest market (fans of hot sad boys) while still including a lot of queer representation but like, even if that is the scheme imo it's a good one. And in this trilogy the main character is bi, one of the lesbians is ace and one of the other characters is in a polyamorous triad. It's pretty good!

(it's funny I hate book recs that start by focusing on how many representation boxes something ticks off, but I guess this isn't a rec (tho I do rec the series it's fab) it's just me rambling)

Anyway without giving away too much of the plot, it's fairly predictable but cool as hell. It keeps its stakes and momentum going all the way through, and I just always really like how the emotional core of the stories is one degree off obvious. Her worlds are ones where there are a lot of scary and dangerous characters and they're often not defeatable in the most straightforward sense, so there's lots of compromises and negotiations. And I love that ryx is a generally calm, sensible and grounded person who goes for negotiation and being reasonable even when things are really difficult. A protagonist after my own heart.

Oh and while writing this I remembered the other book I read recently, the red scholar's wake by aliette de bodard. It's pretty good! I really like her writing style generally, and I think the concepts of her novels are always 10/10, but the execution is very hit or miss. In the vanishers' Palace and fireheart tiger didn't super work for me, they felt breathless and rushed, like none of the events had space to breathe. Fireheart tiger particularly, there was exactly one scene for every plot beat, and a bunch of those plot beats felt like they needed two or three scenes to really hit. It was a novella that should have been a novel, because having a couple subplots would have helped immensely. But then on the other hand dominion of the fallen is 10/10 as is its spinoff series, which I adore even though I don't usually love m/m romances. And seven of infinities is probably my favourite thing she's ever written, it just works really well and has one of the best characters imo.

The red scholar's wake ends up somewhere in the middle. The romance is very strong, which is great and does basically carry everything. The politics is less strong - I wish the other flotilla charcaters got more development, and that again there was just a bit more space. I would have added another like, two subplots to the middle to give us more time with the pirates and to let us get to know the charcaters a bit better. It would also have helped the key child character, because imo she gets attached to the step parent way too easily and quickly and that felt a bit glutinous and contrived. But honestly those complaints didn't super detract from what I liked about the book, it's still a cool as hell setting and the red scholar's wife is a great character. There are some great descriptions that really sell her as a non-human person (not quite in the lancer sense but you know, not a million miles away either).

finished my locked tomb reread/(re)listen. Very good. Feel like I got a really solid grasp of everything that happened in Nona, excited for Alecto

read another light novel, on the principle that I'd read the first one and thought it was okay, and because kobo told me vol 3 was out and I thought it might be nice to have two volumes in a row to read. As is often the case, the second volume was much worse, RIP. Did not continue to the third

Read Illuminations, by T Kingfisher. It was good! Not great, which I think some of her stuff is, but solid. This one was aimed at kids so it didn't have as much meat as her other more gnarly stuff (she even manages to write gnarly romances, which I think is very fun). Would certainly recommend for children of an appropriate age (anywhere from 8 to 12 depending on the child).

And then I started the Obsidian Tower by Melissa Caruso. It's the first in a new trilogy set in the same world as her previous one but (if I'm following correctly) about 150 years later. I really liked that OG trilogy, but hadn't super registered that there was a new one out until I saw a tweet about it cross my timeline. Very happy to have all three books waiting for me though, because they're the kind of fast reads where you don't want to wait to know what happens. And the main character of this one, Ryx, is a delightful touch-starved bisexual, so she's very Relatable. The narrative at the moment very much has the feeling of someone setting up a lot of pins to be knocked over, but that's forgivable at the start of a trilogy. Anyway, excited to keep going and pleased to have found something I can sink into.