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was juggling three books at once (this, space politics, and horny queers fighting zombies) and this was the lightest fare and the narration was fun. (and i don't even like/drink coffee) turns out this homebody really enjoyed the soft, cozy companionship and reno projects. the cast is very sweet and tender 🥹 i wanna be friends with viv and tandri and cal and thimble 🥺 also lol at all the other characters commenting on viv's obliviousness regarding a certain someone.

time travel stuff is notoriously difficult to do well but i think the authors managed to craft something pretty intriguing and satisfying. this makes me want to write letters again. however, i would've rated the book higher if the time we spent with each character (outside of correspondence) weren't so... vague. like, i had a general sense of the nature of each agency, and how their agents operate, but it was more like i was letting the book's atmosphere lazily haze around me than being fully engrossed in the descriptions or actions, some of which was overly metaphorical and more alien than relatable anyway. it's probably best to just describe this as a tender exchange of letters because i don't think the rest will really stick with me if i don't summarize it in this review.

i read this via a combination of hardcover, ebook, and audiobook while at home and on the road. it was a bit tough to get rolling but once i got used to the style (and the plot stakes were higher) things pretty much cruised along through to the end. and i had a guess about something at the beginning that turned out to be right, so that was pleasing.

been following vel's rarepair fanart shitpost account for a while now and had to pick this up after learning it was based on the overwatch league (OWL) fandom. i think vicky starts out a bit too meek for comedic effect (she can't even tell her brother what food she hates?) but i was pleasantly surprised at the groundedness of her growth trajectory and how the backstories of/with her teammates and brother played into that (particularly opal's). also, the esports setting felt very true to my own experience both as a gamer who used to scrim OW at least twice a week and an OWL follower, and i thought the details about being a woman in competitive, team-based pvp—and gaming more generally, but i think team-based pvp, ranked systems, and competitive play do have specific toxicities to them—were well integrated across multiple characters without being heavy-handed.

definitely shelf-worthy. i think some parts could have been slightly less goofy (small scenes with eric, maybe, and some panels with anime/manga visual gags?) and stuff with virgil wrapped up a tad too quickly even though i quite liked the eventual confrontation. minor nitpicks, really, for a coming-of-age story that was really well put together.

my media consumption has unintentionally converged: i just recently watched both volumes of kill bill followed by its inspiration lady snowblood, and yakuza 0 is next up on my games backlog (like a dragon, the JRPG title with kasuga, is the only one i've played in the series). so that should give you an idea of the book content: a bloody action thriller, with severed limbs, tons of misogyny and gross sexual violence, but gratifying physical hand-to-hand combat. it's a short read (translated from what i assume is a light novel) and pages go by fast due to the font size and line spacing. the plot probably fits into a 30-minute tv episode; it's compact and deliberate, with not much to trim off.

i don't want to say too much here because i think the less you know the more you'll enjoy the read (if you're OK with the content warnings above), but i was definitely glad i had a library hard copy to easily flip back to earlier pages. the book jacket synopsis also doesn't allude to this format outside of one word that you'll only figure out the meaning of towards the end, but it's dual POV with a wicked cool confluence.

this has a sapphic asian author and it was probably on my radar from some preview list of upcoming queer releases, and one of the marketing blurbs on the back alludes to it being "part poignant queer love story," but i think that's overselling it. the queerness is more... nebulous, understated. it's got certain themes that will make some audiences go 👀 and i think you'll root for the protagonists like you would for sook-hee and hideko in the handmaiden, but it's a far cry from being a gay romance.

oh, i just don't know about this one. this was a book club read for spooky month, it didn't keep my interest enough for me to finish it before the meeting, and then book club meeting came and went, and i still took forever to finish it afterward. this was disjointed (at first i thought it was the audiobook narration and swapped to hard copy, but no, it was the choppy and overly convoluted writing), and weird shit would happen without giving me a reason to care why. so there's a racist old white lady haunting the house, and all the food is rotting on purpose, and colonialism is bad, and the MC is bi and closeted, cool. i guess we're supposed to root for the MC to make it out of there intact? was that it? if we were supposed to have takeaways about rekindling family connections among the various threads in the novel, that was not executed well.