Jet Silver

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

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.

!!!!!!! Listen, sometimes I love Kingfisher and sometimes I'm ambivalent but this one is one of the more horror-adjacent, it's not a romance, and I fucking loved it. It's set in the Sonoran Desert and I have A Thing about the Sonoran Desert so that was a pretty big bonus. But. A road runner god, honestly. Also I generally do like a story about reclaiming agency.

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 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.

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.

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.

I'm not sure what that was, that I just read, but I enjoyed it a lot despite the confusion.

Then I read the author's Goodreads notes and it all came together for me: “1. The protagonist is the community.”

This is a remarkable something of a book. I wouldn't recommend it to readers who don't like to be dumped into worlds with no explanation for what's happening, where there's not much in the way of a straightforward linear progression, nor to readers who don't like multiple POV. But man, it's a gloriously queer book that also manages to feature left-wing collective work, which was also kind of glorious.

I knew this book and I wouldn't get along, but it was a book subscription offering and I maintain that it doesn't hurt me to read a book I don't choose every so often. Sometimes I'm surprised!

Nope, I hated absolutely everything about this book and I never want to see it again. Probably there is nothing wrong with it, particularly. It just empathically was not the book for me.

I really liked this. Propulsive, interesting world building, characters I liked and believed in. Interesting premise!

It was so close to a four star read for me, but it turns out that I'm so completely over plots that use the Third Act Misunderstanding that it lost a full star. That's a personal gripe and will very likely not bother anyone else. Otherwise A+ magic gay story, more Adelaide Morrissey please.

Abandoned page 125. Just too twee for me.

I mean dude, did you really love The Savage Detectives or what? (My recommendation is to read that instead or as well.)

The art parts, chasing the ghosts of the heroes of your artistic linage, hitting the limits of your own talent? The book made up of those parts is a four star.

The boring chauvinist on the quest? One star to a DNF. I am so, so sick of this guy and he's the same in so many books by so many authors. Please, dazzle me with how random things look like penises. It's fascinating, really.

I remain a bad audience for short stories, even when they sound like they're just my thing.

I really enjoyed book one of this series, but this one is about 60% recap and info dump and 30% teeth-grittingly twee banter. The remaining bits of actual story aren't enough to save it.

Fine, but pretty basic and somewhat specific to Australia.

Every content warning under the sun, but that was really compelling.

You know, that was really pretty solid.

I love the way the world works in these novels, and they do such cool things, but the way they're written just doesn't work for me at all. It really, really wants to be a tv show, not a novel, and as a consequence it reads to me like a script more than a novel.

DNF at 44%. This is a really good book and I might come back to it another time, but it's not for me right now.

If you like gangster politics and kung fu movies with supernatural moves, it might be for you.

Content notes: Violence at typical gangster level, addiction (that's why I'm noping out), intravenous drug use, off screen sexual assault.

Not worth the slog, to be honest. This book was trying to be excessively clever and like most such attempts, just ended up being boring. I felt very put upon, as a reader, putting up with three hundred pages of a literally lobotomised character who doesn't know or remember herself being narrated in second person by a character whose distinctive voice is missing for no plot relevant reason but comes back when it's narratively convenient, and the mechanism by which this is possible is ALSO canonically disproved as a possibility once the last third of the book starts explaining anything. (I know that was a horrible sentence, but sometimes outrage means not taking a breath.) 

I feel like I've been subjected to someone's writing class exercise, and considering the author thanks her Clarion class I'm not far wrong, I think. 

I really wanted to love this, and the plot stuff that actually happened is good and interesting but Jesus. How was this allowed to be five hundred pages long when it's like this?

DNF three and a half hours in because seriously, that is entirely enough rape. I'm done.

Was hoping the clunkiness caused by the translation might be overcome by audio, and indeed it is less flat. But the problems I had with it apparently go beyond the translation, and this world just isn't for me.

I loved the premise of this book. I love the story beats. I love everything that happened. I just didn't really love the execution.

Could be YA and I just need to be on a break.