Emma Goto

Basically the premise is, “imagine that the first Emperor of the Ming dynasty was actually a woman” and go from there. In saying that it skips over a lot of the possible issues that come with a woman pretending to be a man and more focuses on the “attempting to become Emperor” bit.

I really enjoyed how the main character, Zhu, wasn't shy or quiet like someone you would expect to be who is hiding their gender to be. They're talkative, witty, and willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top. This lack of a moral compass towards the end kind of sucks, but I guess that's what it takes to become Emperor.

The book is set across three different eras - the first I found the most interesting, with it being an alternate history late 1800s America where gay marriage is legal (and people even do arranged marriages for it). We then jump 100 years forward to a Hawaiian living in America. It gets a bit confusing here because the main character's names are reused (which made me think this was going to be like Cloud Atlas?) but they're not actually connected in some tangible way, although storywise they are sort of similar. Then we jump forward another 100 years for a dystopian, pandemic-ridden America where gay marriage is now banned in an attempt to increase the population. Honestly you could have just turned one of these eras into it's own book and I probably would have preferred it more!

A common theme across all 3 stories is the uselessness of at least one of the characters in each due to their passivity. Which I visit makes for some frustrating reading. And then I finished the book and it's like, well what was the point? But maybe that's what you get with Yanagihara books. A bunch of people suffering.

This is one of those books that starts off very confusingly, as you're thrust into the stories of five seemingly disconnected lives.

In the 15th century, a boy and a girl living on opposite sides of the walls that protect Constantinople. In modern-day America, a Korean War veteran and a teenager living in a small town. And in the distant future, a girl leaving behind a barren Earth in hopes of reaching a new planet to colonise.

As it turns out, the one thing they have in common is an ancient Greek tale called “Cloud Cuckoo Land”. And the links between their lives all come together for a really satisfying finish.

Shizuka Satomi has sacrificed the souls of six violinists to the devil, and has now found her seventh soul in runaway teen and violin prodigy Katrina. When she visits a local donut shop, owner Lan Tran catches her eye. What she doesn't realise is that the donut shop hides a spaceship, and the Tran family are actually aliens from another planet.

In amongst the quirky plot, the book touches on a lot of serious topics. The main one being the transphobia that Katrina experiences throughout the book. Her parents are unsupportive and abusive, she has to do sex work to make a living, and there's mentions of sexual assault. When she performs as a violinist on stage, she's misgendered and made fun of for wearing a dress. Most of the characters are Asian, so we also see some casual racism directed their way, as well as some bigotry towards two other LGBT characters. There's also the side plot of a violin-maker with super low self-esteem, because her father told her that the secrets of violin-making can only be passed down to his sons.

Unfortunately it didn't quite come together for me. The book tries to straddle too many things. I'll admit I went into expecting a comfy sci-fi read (the book is described as “Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet”) so I finished it feeling really confused and disappointed.

16 yr old Mia Corvere is a darkin - someone that has the ability to control shadows, and has a small shadow-cat as her familiar. She sets off on a journey to find assassin hogwarts so that she can train to take revenge on the people that killed her family.

The writing style is supposedly quite polarising but I found I didn't mind it.

There are a lot of footnotes, and I just skipped them. Since I read it on a Kindle, they're all at the end of the chapter (not sure if it's the same for print?) and I couldn't be bothered to stop reading to jump to footnotes each time. So maybe that helped with the experience.

I also skipped over the cringey sex scenes but otherwise I enjoyed it.

Conveniently, as Mia's classmates die one by one, most of the time it's the first time they've even been mentioned. It's only towards the end that actually recognizable characters start dying.The fact that the school gets overrun so easily at the end makes me question the school's strategy to kill off most of their students each year. Doesn't seem like a smart move at all.And the fact that Cassius is supposed to be some super cool dude and he's caught just like that?? What a dummy.

The book starts off quite strong. We're in New York, and a plague has broken out. Either you're immune to the plague, or you catch it and die. The plague somehow strengthens the ability for a small percentage of the population to use magic. Society collapses, and people flee the city.

However once the book moves onto the bit where you travel the countryside, foraging for supplies, finding shelter and more travel companions (or losing them) it kind of loses steam a bit.

Especially when you get to the too good to be true 300+ person community of New Hope. Which obviously is going to have a conflict of some kind (you let those bad guys leave, who have intimate knowledge of the town, and you don't think they're going to come back and bring more bad guys with them? Really?)

The author builds up a lot of different characters, and so when Lana abruptly leaves them all behind, I don't think that really helps the book either. Especially considering Lana by herself isn't that compelling of a character.

As cadets graduate from Aurora Academy, they set off on their first missions across the galaxy in groups of six. Tyler, top of his class, is looking forward to take first-pick of the graduates to put together his dream team, but ends up leading a bunch of misfits instead.

The book cycles through the POVs of each of the six graduates, as well as the seventh character in our story, Auri. She had set out from Earth on a colonist ship, only for it to go missing 200 years prior. Mysteriously, Tyler finds her in cryo-sleep as the sole survivor on board the ship's wreckage.

The interesting thing to point out about Auri (other than the fact that she is now 200 years old) is that she's half-Chinese. Auri had a fractious relationship with her father (the Chinese parent) and in the book her Chinese heritage is usually brought up alongside mentioning something about her Dad. I guess this is an attempt to bring some extra flavor and conflict to her character. As a fellow half-Asian I did appreciate the attempt at representation but I'm not sure it really did anything for the story. If anything it might have been better to make her full Chinese because the other half of her heritage wasn't really mentioned at all.

There's a bit of romance with an alien “mating bond”. If they did this well I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to it but the fact that they did it and it's bad just makes it all the more cringey. If you're gonna do this right, you've got to do a better job building up to it! It just comes across as really creepy otherwise. Kal martyrs himself by saying "oh, don't worry about me I'll just eternally pine after you and leave and return to my people then" and of course Auri will feel sorry for him and give him a go.

Complaints aside I didn't find it to be too tropey, I liked the conflict between the team who weren't all aligned on their mission especially the conflict with Cat and the betrayal twist.

Sophy bursts into her cousins' lives, all 5'9” of her, with a pet monkey, a parrot and a dog. Unlike the women in an Austen novel, she can handle horses, her father's finances, and even owns a pistol. Schemes and matchmaking attempts ensue.

This is a Regency-era novel, both in the time period and the style of writing. Since it was written in the 50s the author had a bit more imagination as to the level of independence a woman could achieve, so it reads like a more fast-paced Austen novel.

I would've liked to see a better romance for Sophy, though. After writing such an impressive character, I'm surprised anyone could tie her down that easily.

At the old age of 24, Frederica Merriville has no plans on marriage of her own, and is instead keen to see her younger sister Charis matched with a husband worthy of her beauty. She enlists the help of a distant cousin, Alverstoke, to hold a ball to debut Charis into London society.

Alverstoke is a lazy and never one to help out anyone, let alone a bunch of distant cousins. But somehow he finds himself involved in the Merrivilles' lives, even taking on a fatherly (or big brother) role to Frederica's younger brothers, Felix and Jessamy.

The romance itself wasn't bad, but the relationships Alverstoke builds, especially with the brothers, was the most heartwarming part of the story to me.

As a poor cousin sent to live amongst her more privileged relations, Fanny Price is a fairly meek and boring leading character, as far as Jane Austen books go. She's content to be a wallflower, and her poor self-esteem isn't helped by comments from her aunts like “remember, wherever you are, you must be the lowest and the last”. Yikes.

Even the dude she is pining for says “she is the only woman in the world whom I could ever think of as a wife” - and he's not talking about her! Ouch.

The romance all gets summarised in a “at some point in the future, this and this happens” which is fairly unsatisfying as an ending.

So I knew this book was originally a Kylo Ren / Rey fanfic before I started reading it. Which made things unintentionally funny because you can't help but imagine Kylo Ren doing all this weird romance novel shit (pushing a car shirtless across a carpark? Ok). And when he repeatedly gets described as being “broad” and “massive” (kind of cringey tbh) all I could think of was that Ben swolo meme which made me laugh too.



The author made 0 effort to change the physical appearances of the characters - she literally named the guy Adam. Because she's just straight up describing Adam Driver in the book it's almost creepy. I feel like there's a difference between gushing over the physical appearance of a fictional person versus a real-life person?

Gotta give it a 4/5 though because the Reylo stan in me just wants a happy Reylo ending for once.

Beautiful, drug-addicted singer Daisy and the band The Six come together to write an album in the 70s. The entire book is told in an interview format, which I think works really well, since it lets the different characters give their own (slightly different) perspectives on certain events.

The author tried to incorporate some sort of twist to the ending but it wasn't a particularly revelatory or “wow” moment for me. Nonetheless, Taylor Jenkins Reid has once again done a really good job with writing out a cast of believable, very human characters.

This book outlines “attachment theory” - how people express themselves in relationships falls into roughly three buckets:

* Secure: doesn't have any issues expressing love
* Anxious: is more of the “clingy” type
* Avoidant: is cold, tends to withdraw or easily break things off

Basically if you're a secure type, you're all good but if you're an insecure type (anxious or avoidant), and your partner is also an insecure type, you're probably going to experience some relationship issues. Actually the book goes one step further and basically says “if you're both insecure types you're probably never going to be as happy as you would be if you dated a secure person, but whatever”. A bit of a spicy take but could be true though.

Some of the criticism I saw previously when reading reviews for this book is that it's pro-anxious and anti-avoidant. While I did feel that vibe a bit (the author definitely seemed a tad more sympathetic to anxious types) as a self-diagnosed avoidant I didn't really feel personally attacked or anything. If anything I could agree with a lot of the things the author pointed out (although reading about it is one thing, actually putting it into practice is a hell of a lot harder...).

I was expecting a continuation from the first Wayfarers book but this can almost be read as a standalone. A ship AI struggles with finding her identity and sense of purpose after being placed (illegally) in a human-like body. At the same time we follow the story of a genetically modified girl, Jane 23, destined to spend her life working in a factory, who escapes and has to figure out how to live in the outside world. Even though it tackles some heavy subjects, it's just such a cozy, comfy sci-fi thanks to the relationships the different aliens and AIs build with each other.

Basically the plot of the story is that there's an alternate reality earth with huge kaiju (think Godzilla) and it's the Kaiju Preservation Society's job to look after them.

The main character is a fan of sci-fi novels, so as a fellow sci-fi fan it was fun picking up on the references (is this what it's like to read and actually enjoy Ready Player One??).

However I did feel like the climax/resolution was a bit of a letdown, a bit too much of an invincible, main characters can do no wrong, vibe. But otherwise fun if you don't take it too seriously. Hence why I couldn't give it a 5 star!

Science fiction with a romance subplot is by far my favourite genre, and there sadly isn't enough of it so for that reason I'm biased into giving this book a 5, but would probably dock half a star or more otherwise. I binged this one in one sitting on the plane so I definitely enjoyed it!

Basically the plot revolves around people with the ability to influence minds (architects) as well as those with the ability to read them (readers). For some reason architects are accepted in society and it's the readers that have to keep their powers a secret. And I struggled a bit to wrap my head around that one since manipulating thoughts seems a lot more dangerous than just reading them. And then they smash in that romance subplot by forcing an architect to mind-bond with a reader (yes sounds cheesy but it's good I promise).

Yet another comfy read from Becky Chambers. Pity it is only a novella - is it quite short. This was my first time reading solarpunk and I want to read more of it! Robots don't want to work in factories anymore because they've developed consciousness? No problems, just shut down your factories, send them on their way and work around it. It's a very utopian-seeming future, unlike steampunk/sci-fi which is usually quite gritty and dark. I guess it's almost like a fantasy in how unrealistic it is lol.

A book about a team reintroducing wolves back into Scotland to help restore the ecosystem. It's fiction, but does take real-life inspiration from how wolves were successfully reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park. The story comes with a side of romance and murder mystery which is not quite as compelling as the wolves, though.

Not a big fan of the ending - it felt absurd that the sister was responsible for killing a grown man, nearly killing another, and killing a dog (the biggest crime of all, tbh) and then she gets away with it, no psychiatric treatment necessary, and conveniently goes off to die in the forest on her own.

A collection of Asian-inspired short stories. My personal favourite was “State Change”, where everyone's soul manifests as an object such as an ice cube or a candle, and you have to focus on keeping it intact to stay alive. Another standout was “Mono no aware”, a heartwarming story about Go and being the last Japanese person aboard a spaceship. Some of the stories are inspired by more serious topics from history such as the discrimination faced by Chinese immigrants during the 1850s American gold rush and Japan's WW2 war crimes.

I really struggled to get into this one. I found the story quite hard to follow, because of how many different characters get introduced throughout the book. It's a pity because there's a lot of cool sci-fi concepts here (i.e. uploading your brain to another body). Also this guy is horny AF, there is random unnecessary sex everywhere (aren't you a trained soldier, just do your job!) and sometimes it just doesn't make sense when the woman jumps on him like it's very male fantasy. So if you're a dude and you're into sex and violence this may be the sci-fi novel for you.

I guess this book is about becoming a woman? Or wanting to become a mother? Kind of hard to sum up. It also had some slightly surrealist, Murakami vibes - which makes me wonder is that because it is similar, or do Japanese books translated to English generally end up like this?

Also interesting to note is that the original book was written in Kansai-ben (a more rough-sounding Japanese dialect) but the book hasn't made any attempt to translate that and has done it purely in standard English. Which makes me wonder how different the experience would be if you read it in Japanese.

Every decade 6 of the world's top magicians are chosen to join a secret society that has access to the Library of Alexandria. Only 5 will make it through to their second year of study.

The (small) romance portion didn't pan out the way I expected, which was nice. The most annoying part for me was there was a whole lot of plot suddenly vomited out in the last 20% (which I didn't really care about?) and ends on a cliffhanger as a set up for the next book.

Otherwise I enjoyed this one. Although the whole secret society thing as a concept seemed iffy, considering most of them are kind of bad/selfish people, and they'll go on to assume leadership positions across the world with the knowledge and skills they gain.

Random thought that I had while reading - the fact that 3 women and 3 men were chosen is great but doesn't feel realistic when you think about the gender ratios of positions of power in the world today and idk if that needed to be addressed? Or I guess magic causes a true meritocracy (but then again this is a fantasy book so maybe I shouldn't complain about realism when there's magic involved).

This book was very... different. The main plot involves a house that defies science and is larger on the inside. But instead of just being a straightforward story it's told from the perspective of a researcher who wrote a manuscript compiling all the research and references from people who are discussing the film tapes that were made from exploring the house. (However the film tapes don't seem to exist). Sometimes there will be a page in French, or a page full of literally a list of 100 (irrelevant) names that you just have to skip over. So I guess it's a very artsy sort of book? But the mystery of the plot is compelling enough to keep it going.

This was a historical fiction book about the Nigerian Civil War that took place in the 1960s. It covers 5 viewpoints - upper-class twin sisters, a professor, a boy from a village and a British journalist - and the relationships they share with each other. Obviously as a wartime story it's very gripping and can be quite sad to read, but there was also drama just in the interpersonal relationships between the main characters as well. Going into the book I knew absolutely nothing about the war, so it was really nice to be able to enjoy reading a book plus learn something new at the same time!

The plot follows a couple of criminals plus a monk who hates women, plus a 3ft tall badger-person (who is honestly so cute) as they go on a suicide mission.

T Kingfisher just writes really comfy fantasy with a dash of romance (usually with proper adults with issues instead of your more typical teen fantasy romance) and this was definitely more of the same but a good one!

It felt really hard to rate this one on its own, because it honestly felt like half a book with the way it ended on a cliffhanger. But it was compelling enough that I read the sequel back to back. Combined the two of them are 5 stars!!