Jet Silver

This was a random pick from a library shelf. The MC is an immigrant from Bolivia who works as a babaláwo in Miami, but doesn't believe in what he does. He's heavily in debt in that predatory debt-collector way and his "indebtedness" is a force that's almost a character in itself.

A debut novel and it showed a bit. I didn't love this—it didn't quite know what it was (when the copy says it's genre-bending, it means it), and I found the main character just plain unlikable. After his third or forth explosion of temper (always directed at women or someone with less social power than him) with no self-reflection I just didn't care very much about whether he 'won'. Flawed characters are excellent, but this was one of those times I felt like the author didn't see the flaws. However, I haven't read very much from Cuban-American authors and I appreciated the perspective.

Three WLW—a knight, a sorcerer-madwoman and a fallen Lady—are trying to save the population of a castle under siege. Rations will run out in fourteen days. There's religion, magic, and horror. I ended up loving this, but I nearly DNF'd about five times first. It doesn't really find its feet until the halfway point, when the POV characters start to interact with each other. After that? So good. Creepy supernatural things, learning rules of magic on the fly, honour, revenge and some lusting. Content warning: cannibalism, starvation, general horror.

SO highly recommended. The MC is a stoic Chinese-Canadian queer woman coming to her breaking point in relatable, gorgeously drawn fashion. It's about family responsibility and who has it, holding onto friendships formed in different stages of life, and the general bullshit of hospitality work. I absolutely ate this up.

I was a bit meh on this until about halfway, and then it charmed me. Intergenerational Mexican/Texan drama with a touch of magical realism. Grapples with colonial and genocidal history, frontier violence, and legacy. Content warnings for all the violence you can think of, and animal death.

Oh my god that was fun. Marske is usually a hit for me and this one absolutely killed it. It's a gothic novella with the most fun Cinderella riff I've ever seen and a perfect HEA but not in a way you'd expect. Bisexuals represent.

This is the most "book I wouldn't normally read" of the year, probably. Old school, tradpub, M/F romance. I picked it up because a handful of readers I follow rave about it and it sounded like something I wouldn't hate.

I didn't hate it—it's very well written—but I can't say I liked it either. It's widow/rake slow burn, and the characters are well drawn and fully rounded. The writing style is detailed, immersive and propulsive. I liked spending time in this world. But the author's done such a good job at flawed characters that while I liked the leads as characters, they're both such assholes in an unfun way that I wasn't particularly invested in their relationship. Maybe in an ESH, you all deserve each other kind of way. In fact every character sucks in some way or another. That's not necessarily a criticism but I personally need to like at least one character to love a book.

There's the kind of ugh gender essentialism that's just in the water for a book published in 1991, and I also wasn't a fan of the no-no-yes trope. That said! This is a good book. Turns out I still don't like romance-as-the-A-plot books nor reading about rich people being miserable assholes to each other, though. BUT I also devoured all 500-odd pages of it in two days. This isn't an anti-rec. I was never bored. Just not a book for me.

I adored this.

Originally written in the Kannada language, this is a selection of short stories about Muslim women in southern India. I started with the Translator's Note chapter and I'm glad I did, because Bhasthi emphasised the oral storytelling cadence of the stories and the choices she'd made around localisation and being true to the stories' origins. I found the writing really immersive and relatable and I got to learn a bit about a community I wasn't familiar with. One of those books whose vocabulary and rhythm gets into your thoughts and stays with you for days.

I love Clark's work. This was inventive and immersive and just so much fun, just like all of Clark's books. Exuberant. This one's about alt-history New Orleans, gods and race and racism and apocalypse and agency. There are airships and pirates and goddesses and our POV character is dynamite. As usual, I wanted it to be longer but also, it's perfect as it is.

I love Araluen's lyric voice and the deft shifting between tones and registers, academic to poetic to the cadences of day to day city/country life. This is a slim volume but it's so dense with meaning and shifts that I read it over a week, in small bursts.

A favourite stanza:

It is hard to unlearn a language:

to unspeak the empire,

to teach my voice to rise and fall like landscape,

a topographic intonation