What if I did a reading roundup from last month? With some excerpts from my reading journal, even?
Romance
- Threshold of Annihilation by T A White
- Love Laugh Litch and The Orc from the Office by Kate Prior
- Machine Metal Magic by Hannah Dare
Did I enjoy these? Yes! Do I have anything interesting to say about them? Nope!
- Half a Soul and Ten Thousand Stitches by Olivia Atwater
Huge squee for these two from me! I think Half a Soul was the stronger of the two, with both a more compelling MMC and a better setup, but they were both pretty great. I was a little surprised to find that they weren't just closed-door, but practically physical-contact free (I think both of them have, like, one kiss in them? Two maybe?) given that they were self-published originally and then picked up by Orbit, which tends to the two-and-a-half sex scene romance convention.
- Paladin's Hope by T. Kingfisher
Another huge squee read for me. I know this came out a bit ago, but I did the first two in audio and I have this thing about changing formats in the middle of the series and the audio only came out this year after I had read the first two. Honestly I wish I'd done them all in eBook-- not that the audio is bad, I just didn't love-love the narrator and I don't normally prefer romances in audio to begin with. But these are all so much fun!
- This Is Why They Hate Us by Aaron H. Aceves
Boy howdy am I not the target audience for this. I’m too old to read about teenagers having deeply unsatisfactory sexual experiences and thinking they are so incredibly all alone while being absolutely up to the gills in emotional support and love and acceptance from all sides. I mean, I think it was actually really good, though? Just for actual honest to god teenagers and not adults who read YA sometimes. (Also I think I found this in a roundup of 2022 releases with bisexuals in and it has a super bisexual cover and everything, and like, okay, technically, yes, there are multiple bisexual boys in it, it felt very much like a gay book to me. Which is great, just, you know, not what I wanted. As previously stated, I am so not the target audience)
Romance... ish? Romantic Fantasy??
- A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows
I have very mixed feelings about this one! On the one hand, I love a good m/m marriage of convenience trope, and Meadows’s setup, with the protagonist traveling to a patriarchal society to a queernorm culture, allows us to get a lot of the good good tension of forbidden gay love stories combined with some of the better things about queernorm fantasy settings. The heroes are clever and care about each other and a lot of it is just plain fun!
On the other… there were some weird pacing issues, and I found the first person pov that swaps every section instead of every chapter to be an odd and clunky decision. The end also felt extremely unsatisfying both from a romance perspective and from a high fantasy court drama and intrigue perspective.
This isn’t a romance novel, and wasn’t exactly marketed as one, but I feel like it could have been edited into a truly extraordinary proper romance novel instead of the only okay romantic fantasy we ended up getting. It almost felt like some of the romance beats has been shaved off, and the mover structured the way it was, in order to make it not a romance novel. If it had been, I wouldn’t have minded the intrigue plot ending with an implausible coincidence quite so much.
- Notorious Sorcerer by Davinia Evans
OKAY Orbit, I love that you're publishing romance novels now, I really do, but that also means that you need to get your marketing shit together because if this is a romance novel I am upset and if it is the first in a fantasy trilogy from a debut author I fucking loved it and I honestly do not know which this is supposed to be. It has everything: bisexual second sons who don't know what to do with themselves, rooftop swordfights, rival gangs of bravos that are half street entertainment and half criminal enterprises, planar alignment issues, a harpy, and all kinds of mayham.
I am really looking forward to seeing what Evans does next, for sure!
Definitely Not Romances
- Rivers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovich
- Child of Fire by Harry Connolly
I feel like these could actually be really interesting comparisons between the ways that British and American urban fantasy series in the 2010s took different types of detective stories as their touchstones, if I had the energy to do ✨literary analysis✨ these days.
- Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan
It took me like 2 months to actually finish this after starting it, but it's really good y'all. I love Chen Qiufan's short fiction, and this is just as fantastic. I wish it had gotten translated/I had read it a little sooner, because it does show its age a little bit, but it's still just a phenomenally interesting novel.
- Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky
There is just so much happening here all over the place-- I loved the previous one, but I can't honestly say I have strong feelings about this. It very much feels like a middle novel in a trilogy, you know? Plus I did this one in audio and I feel like I didn't do a great job of paying attention, so mostly I remember the vibes and not the actual novel.
Still gonna read the next one, though.