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Today I finished the latest book in the Baru Cormorant series (fourth book remains to-be-released), The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. Y'all, Baru is so back.

! Spoilers for books 1 & 2 below !

If you've looked at other reviews for the series, you may have seen book 2, The Monster Baru Cormorant, referred to as the series' "sophomore slump." I disagree, but I understand where the feeling comes from. The Monster feels like a prelude, a setting of the board, for The Tyrant. The Monster puts all the pieces in place for the cascade of schemes and plays that come in The Tyrant. They almost feel like one book split into two (which is fair—taken together, they represent about a thousand pages and would make for one mammoth novel).

If you felt like Baru was too passive in The Monster and that there wasn't enough scheming going on, I can happily report those things are wholly rectified in The Tyrant. Having located the infamous and quasi-mythological Cancrioth at the end of The Monster, Baru wastes no time in whipping into full savant plotting mode.

( Read more... )

rocky41_7

The day after finishing The Traitor Baru Cormorant I had to rush over to the library to pick up book 2, The Monster Baru Cormorant, which I finished earlier today.

Spoilers for The Traitor Baru Cormorant below!

The second book of a fantasy series of any kind often bears a very difficult burden. It is most often the place where the scope of the story grows significantly. A conflict which before was local to the protagonist's home and surrounding area may expand, often to the extent of the known world. New players are often added to the cast, bigger and scarier problems and challenges arise. The protagonist may have gone up in the world, wielding new power and influence, with new responsibilities. As a result, this is where many series lose their footing; a tightly-woven book or season 1 may give way to a muddled, watered down part 2 as the writers struggle to juggle this expanded focus.

The Monster suffers from none of those things. It is the place where Baru's story expands—in The Traitor, her focus was almost entirely on Aurdwynn; it was the full field of play and outside players mattered only as they influenced events on Aurdwynn. In The Monster, Baru has become a true agent of the Imperial Throne of Falcrest, and with these new powers, the entire field of the empire is opened up for her play, and it is fascinating to watch.

In The Traitor, Baru was narrowly focused on managing the situation in Aurdwynn; everything she did was to that end. In The Monster, Baru can do whatever she wants, and we get to see her finally on the open field. Even where she flounders and flails, it's delightful to watch the machinations of her mind constantly at work. Her cleverness rows against her bursts of sentimentality to produce some impressively chaotic effects, but she is as slippery as an eel to pin down, even when her rivals think they've gotten the best of her.

( Read more... )

rocky41_7

On Saturday afternoon, on the bus ride home, I finished The Traitor Baru Cormorant, because I couldn't wait until I got home to reach the end, despite a long history of reading-induced car sickness. It was totally worth it.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is all fantasy politics. There's no magic or fairies or prophecies, just Seth Dickinson's invented world and the titanic machinations of Empire. And it is electric. Tentatively, I'd make a comparison to The Goblin Emperor, except that where TGE is about how Maia, completely unprepared for his role, is thrust into a viper's nest of politics, Baru Cormorant is about how Baru has painstakingly taught herself the ways of the empire and enters into the game fully prepared to rewrite the rules to her liking.

Dickinson creates a wonderfully believable world. The Empire of Masks—popularly known as the Masquerade—is sickeningly plausible, with their soft conquests of money and ideas backed by a highly-trained and well-equipped military. The Masquerade is not content to conquer land—it must conquer minds, people. It is relentless in its push to force its colonies and territories to adopt its ways of thinking, to the point of dictating who may and may not marry based on their bloodlines. With this comes a heaping dose of homophobia, frequently enforced on cultures who had formerly been relaxed or even accepting of queer identities and relationships. This presents a specific problem for Baru, who is the daughter of a mother and two fathers, and who is herself a deeply closeted lesbian.

The story makes use of incredibly mundane tools in its schemes, something that also rings realistic. It's not all backstabbing, murder, and blackmail—at one point, a serious political threat is nullified through currency inflation. Baru, who becomes an imperial accountant, is in a prime position to use these seemingly dull tools to marvelous effect. Many schemes are strangled in the cradle, such that only the plotter and the defeater are even aware that they existed. But the game goes on.

( Read more... )

rocky41_7

On Monday's outbound commute I finished the audiobook for Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk. This is a supernatural/fantasy noir romance and it does pack a lot of all three of those things into its brief 4-hour runtime.

This book relies heavily on stock film noir tropes—the veteran down-and-out private (paranormal) investigator (here a lesbian, Helen, our protagonist) who drinks too much and is haunted by past mistakes, a mysterious and sexy female client with a unique case, and "just one last" job before the PI plans to quit and retire with a beloved romantic partner. I didn't find them overused—and seeing them reworked to queer and female characters was fun—but other readers may find them too worn out even here.

Because the book is so short, it moves along at a very rapid pace. The whole thing takes place over the course of two days—the final two days before Helen's soul debt is called due and she finally has to pay the price of her warlock bargain. In this way, any rush felt appropriate, since it fit both the size of the novel and the context of Helen's urgency to get this last job done before she has to pay up.

The characters weren't super developed, but again—4-hour runtime. They're a little stock character-y, but not total cardboard cut-outs. It was disappointing for me to see Helen make the same mistake at the end of the book that she did prior to the start, as if she hadn't really learned anything, but since the novel ends promptly after that, the story never has to reckon much with it.

I was relieved that Edith, Helen's girlfriend, wasn't just the damsel in distress/goal object for Helen, which I was a bit worried about in the beginning. Edith has secrets and goals of her own.

Overall, the book was fine, and it entertained me well enough for a few days. Nothing extraordinary here, but nothing objectionable either. I will say I think keeping it short worked best for this book—I think drawing it out might have only weakened it. A fun little twist on a typical noir novel.

Crossposted to

books and my main

chestnut_pod

Metal From Heaven by August Clarke

I recommend to everyone

skygiants' review for a perspective from someone who enjoyed this book more than me. I respected it, but I can't say I liked it. However, it is clear to me that many people would like this very much! A violently purple, ambitious fantasy story about lesbians who hate each other and the workers' revolution (sort of).

I felt like it careened out of its own control around the 2/3 mark (which is also where one can audibly start hearing the Evangelion theme song). However, if you like swirly-marbled psychedelic books with 90s anime antecedents where every character can be described as The [attractiveness adjective] [morality adjective] Lesbian, evil blue tangerines, and other people's trip diaries, this is for you. It's very very different, ambitious, and fresh, which one likes to reward, so I hope it gets lots of attention, even if it wasn't totally for me.

But Not Too Bold, by Hache Pueyo

This was… basically okay. "Lady Mary and Mr. Fox" but lesbian horror-spiders. I appreciated how the Folklore Flavor details were specific in a way that I find sadly uncommon in this species of contemporary "monster" "romance" fantasy. It is stuck halfway between the broad strokes of a fairytale and the demands of a lengthier novella trying to have a mystery plot, and the romance is really just armature.

The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands, by Sarah Brooks

This is a blown egg of a book. There's a shell of cool things, like trans-continental trains, eco-horror gaslamp-style, a quasi-Rusalki in ambiguous love with the orphaned Chinese train-foundling, and alt-history, but the shell is all there is. Bombastic but substanceless.

Hopefully in the next few months I will read some new-to-me F/F which I can wholeheartedly love.

rocky41_7

This week I finished The Dawnhounds, the first book of the The Endsong series by Sascha Stronach.

This book has been compared to Gideon the Ninth, which I think does it a disservice, because while there are enjoyable things about it, if you go into it expecting The Locked Tomb, I think you're going to be disappointed. They are not on the same level.

Protagonist Yat's homeland—the port city of Hainak—is implied to have been colonized and fought a revolution to escape that, but while some of the changes have been welcome—the embrace of "biotech," freedom of determination—her home is in the throes of sliding from one abusive regime to another. They have thrown off the yoke of colonization, but as Yat comes to slowly realize over the course of the novel, what they replaced it with isn't much better.

Yat is in a prime position to realize this. A former street rat turned cop who joined the police in hopes of making a positive change for people like herself, she's been slowly worn down over the years into someone who simply closes her eyes to the worse abuses by the government and partakes herself in the lesser offenses. The kick-off for the story isn't any of that though—it's that Yat is demoted after her coworkers learn she's patronized a queer bar. She's blundering through the fallout of that—continuing to patronize that same bar, and using drugs to cope—when the fantasy plot hits her in the head.

Unfortunately, here is where the novel began to lose me. I think the comparisons with The Locked Tomb arise from the way The Dawnhounds throws the reader into the plot with the promise of revealing more information later. Except that where TLT is a masterclass in subterfuge and gradual reveals that make perfect sense in retrospect, and in some cases reframed entire characters and story arcs, The Dawnhounds just...never really reveals the information.

( Read more... )

rocky41_7

Latest commute audiobook: Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield. This novel is about a woman, Miri, whose wife is a marine biologist, and goes on a submarine expedition for work meant to last three weeks. Six months later, Leah's sub finally resurfaces, but she isn't the same person Miri remembers.

This is another WIN for online queer recs - I thoroughly enjoyed it. I may even buy a copy for myself. There is a horror element to this story—for Miri, our primary narrator, the horror of watching someone you love become something you don't recognize or understand—but mostly Our Wives Under the Sea is a meditation on grief and loss. It is so easy to transform this story into a metaphor for anyone with a loved one who is terminally ill, or missing, or otherwise there, but not there.

( Read more... )

rocky41_7

My latest commute audiobook was A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson, a vampire novel that strides along at a brisk 5 hours run time. I have to admit upfront I did not have high hopes for this book. I somewhat warily added it to my TBR list, but I feared tired romantasy tropes that don't hit for me, and that the queerness which had landed it on my radar would turn out to be little more than additional titillation for a straight audience looking for a tale of decadence and indecency. I'm quite pleased to report neither of those concerns came to fruition!

As the title might suggest, there's a level of melodrama in this book you have to accept to enjoy the story. It reminded me in some ways of AMC's Interview with the Vampire in its shameless embrace of all those usual vampiric tropes and in the extravagances of its characters and its prose. Throughout the introduction, I was trying to decide if this was fun, or overwrought. I came down on the side of fun.

( Read more... )

hebethen

Not quite romance, nor quite horror -- I would say H. Pueyo's new novella But Not Too Bold is sort of a dark fairytale that runs on the logic of dreams transformed to mythology and then again rendered through a single artist's lens.

As the name suggests, a primary inspiration is the Bluebeard tale and its relatives, with the titular character here reimagined as an undeniably inhuman supernatural being with her own very particular predilections and obsessions. I enjoyed both the folklorically eccentric specificity of the worldbuilding and setting details and the painterly touches of equally eccentric character cameos. When it comes to the main character -- a high-ranking servant in the mansion of the "Bluebeard" analogue -- I am of two minds. On the one hand, her own eccentricity, of which she seems little aware, feels simultaneously natural and supernatural in a very tonally suitable way; on the other hand, perhaps it is a little too abstracted into the realm of fairytale to strike my heart beyond that. I would be curious as to how she came off to other readers!

(Note: arachnophobes and arachnophiles will both have reason to wince at some scenes. ( Read more... ))

((Oh, and, TGIF! :P))

chestnut_pod

girlmeetstrouble is having a read-along of KJ Charles' f/f Edwardian romance novel Proper English! It began last week, but we are only through chapter 4, so there is plenty of time to catch up.

hebethen

Happy Friday! A couple of fandom exchanges revealed works recently,

candyheartsex and

rarefemslashexchange, so I thought I'd come bearing fic recs :) I'll edit in authors after creator reveals, of course!

( Seven recs from 300 words to ~5k )

I would love your recs if you have other ones as well! May the spirit of Femslash February bless your entertainments, either way :P

lesbiangalatea

Here is the link to my review and recommendation of the lesser known Japanese horror movie with lesbian elements, X-Cross! lesbiangalatea.dreamwidth.org/1708.html

The poster for the movie X-Cross, featuring a woman in a lolita dress wielding twin scissors and a bloody title above her.

The poster for the movie X-Cross, featuring a woman in a lolita dress wielding twin scissors and a bloody title above her.

rocky41_7

I'm not doing a full review, but it came to my attention today that the webcomic Kochab, which delighted me with its gorgeous art and sweet sapphic romance for years, has started up a print run. So if you're the type, like me, to prefer hard copies to digital comics, now is your chance!

Recommend if you:

Enjoy adventure stories but prefer them at a slower pace
Prefer to read a comic that's been completed rather than one in progress
Enjoy stories about characters getting over past traumas
Enjoy stories about the transformative power of love

Do not recommend if you:

Want high stakes in your adventure stories
Are looking for a spicy romance
Prefer large casts of characters
Want a complex story with lots of moving parts

rocky41_7

Frontier by Grace Curtis is a space western, which takes place far in the future after much of Earth's population has abandoned it due to catastrophic climate change.

Then a ship falls from the sky, bringing the planet's first visitor in three hundred years. This Stranger is a crewmember on the first ship in centuries to attempt a return to Earth and save what's left. But her escape pod crashes hundreds of miles away from the rest of the wreckage.

The Stranger finds herself adrift in a ravaged, unwelcoming landscape, full of people who hate and fear her space-born existence. Scared, alone, and armed, she embarks on a journey across the wasteland to return to her ship, her mission, and the woman she loves.

I really enjoyed the way this novel revealed its story. Rather than simply track the traveler from place to place, the story shows us the traveler's journey through the eyes of the people who encounter her: a small-town librarian at odds with the local mayor, the young son of a preacher with a nasty secret, a shady woman on a quest of her own. Each chapter opens with setting the perspective of this onlooker before the traveler comes into the scene, and I felt like this was a very fun and creative way of telling her story, as well as giving us a lot more information about the world and culture of Earth in this story's universe than we could get from the traveler's perspective alone.

The traveler herself is an excellent blend of competent and human: as an astronaut among a deeply Luddite population which has technologically stagnated for centuries, she has certain advantages, like her advanced weaponry, which can quickly resolve some situations. However, she can be divested of these advantages without enormous effort: if she loses her gun, if she's facing too many enemies, if she succumbs to bodily weakness like exhaustion or injury, she's no better off than any Earthling in her situation would be.

She certainly possesses a skillset that helps her through her journey, but she's also a person. She feels fear, anxiety, weariness. She has tells when she lies, she has moments of awkwardness, she makes mistakes. She's not Terminator in a cowboy hat blasting her way to victory while the challenges slide off her without a mark.

The romance was fine. Sweet, but unremarkable. I do enjoy more queer fantasy that doesn't center romance though, so that's a win!

Some other reviews felt the ending wrapped up too quickly, but personally I was satisfied. I didn't need a confrontation with the main antagonist drawn out any more; he was such a loathsome character that I simply wasn't interested in seeing more of him. I was content with where the book left things.

On the whole, I enjoyed this book more than I expected. It was just long enough to tell its story satisfactorily without overstaying its welcome. I enjoyed the detours into side characters that gave us colorful glimpses into what life is like on Earth for the locals rather than relegating us merely to the traveler's outsider perspective. It does leave lots of loose threads behind, but it felt realistic and never, for me, unsatisfying. Life goes on after the traveler has moved onto her next goal.

A fun read!

hebethen

Happy Friday all!

I came across Run Away with Me, Girl (Kakeochi Girl) while browsing around pretty randomly and ended up quite enjoying it. It's a four-volume josei manga, with a refreshingly distinct and expressive artstyle, that I would describe as a bit of a subversion of the "S-class romance" trope: grad student Maki's childhood girlfriend Midori, who had seemed to move on as societally acceptable, shows back up in her life pregnant and engaged -- but all is not well in Midori's supposed paradise, and it's time for Maki to get serious about the title drop. The external obstacles are obvious, but I especially appreciated the depiction of their internal conflicts: each of the deuteragonists is at a different point in their journey to overcome the different ways they're inclined to acquiesce to expectations or individual pressures, and I enjoyed the difficult and imperfect ways in which they got in their own and each others' ways as they struggled with the cards they were dealt.

The first three volumes are officially available in English translation as ebooks only, but it looks like the publisher didn't pick up the fourth and final volume, which is of course where a lot of resolution happens. Unfortunate, although of course the fans picked up the slack in their own way. (See comments, I am misinformed!)

Despite the overall happy arc, the manga does cover some fairly heavy stuff and isn't a lighthearted read. ( Content notes: )

chestnut_pod

Perhaps a slightly strange entry for this comm, but I imagine there's crossover interest.

This is a new(ish) hardback annotated + illustrated edition of Mrs Dalloway from Norton, with contextual annotations and critical foreword added by literary scholar Merve Emre, but aimed at a non-scholarly audience. Everyone should obviously read Mrs Dalloway, but this is a review of the annotated edition, rather than the novel per se.

I had bought this annotated edition as a gift for a family member, but I went ahead and read it before I wrapped it up. The verdict: okay! Probably quite satisfying for non-academics. I personally thought the balance was off between footnotes I welcomed which explained particular political/historical happenings relevant to the text, gestured towards interesting academic readings, and compared draft histories and the development of specific passages, and footnotes which, literally, explained over the course of two full page-margins what Big Ben is. I'm just pretty sure people reading a $35 USD hardback annotated Mrs Dalloway on purpose are going to know what Big Ben is, and I would rather know more about what changes were made to the character of Rezia. However! There were annotations of the nature I preferred, and I definitely learned some interesting things, including scholars whose work I would like to look at more closely. I do also want to give Emre significant credit for not toeing the Hermione Lee party line and giving sexual assault and abuse their rightful place in these annotations, both as an element of the novel and as an element of Woolf's personal history.

This edition is also a beautiful book-object, full of lovely illustrations and photographs. I thought the paper stock was a good thickness and the cover was pretty. Definitely a great gift book for the right person.

rocky41_7

The week before last Libby showed me a list of books my library recommended, all books translated into English in whole or in part by female translators. I made the sore mistake of going through the whole list and added about thirty new books to my TBR. This was the first of them that I've finished! It's called On a Woman's Madness by Surinamese author Astrid Roemer, translated from Dutch by Lucy Scott. The book description is:

When Noenka's husband refuses her request for divorce, she flees her small hometown for the city, where life is simultaneously free and unfree: an open book; a closed door.

Full review on my main.

Recommend if:

You like books that focus heavily on characters' emotions
You enjoy "soul searching" stories
You like messy or struggling main characters

Do not recommend if:

You prefer a linear story which communicates itself clearly
You don't enjoy heavy subject material (definitely check your trigger warnings for this book)
You want a plot-driven story

rocky41_7

This is the second book in the Wayward Children series (first book: Every Heart A Doorway). This book focuses on Jack and Jill from Every Heart, and what happened to them before they came to Ms. West's school.

Twin sisters Jack and Jill were seventeen when they found their way home and were packed off to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children.

This is the story of what happened first…

Spoilers below!

( Read more... )

chestnut_pod

I read this in one effervescent gulp on a plane. It was a daytime flight, so I had to stay awake for my own good, and Lady Eve's Last Con kept me from noticing that I had been awake for 24+ hours. A heist novel, a comedy of manners, and a romance all rolled up into one gilded outer-space confection like some kind of literary gougère. Ruthi, a minor con artist in the throes of separation anxiety from her little sister, sets out (unasked!) to revenge herself on the wealthy cad who abandoned and impregnated said little sister. The best way to do this, of course, is through the most convoluted identity-cum-marriage hornswoggle ever devised. Unfortunately, this brings Ruthi into unexpected contact with some other, concurrent, far more life-and-death hornswoggles afoot on the glamorous Space!Art Deco station… and said cad's alluring and suspicious sister, Hot Butch Tuxedo Mask! How will our plucky main character get out of her predicament, and possibly into HBTM? With heaps of style, a genuinely touching story of personal growth, and a venture into outer-space kashrut law which made me guffaw from my middle seat and tied the whole glorious romp together in its combined absurdity and sincerity. A book for yiddishekopfs.

blueshiftofdeath

I listened to the audiobook for this, which was pretty short (3 hours and 20 minutes). I really enjoyed it! It's definitely a light read, not an epic sprawling romance, but was very sweet and still managed to have a fair amount of emotional depth.

My understanding is this book is a spin-off of the author's heterosexual romance A Princess in Theory, in which an undercover prince (from a fictional African country) falls in love with an ordinary American woman. The main characters of Once Ghosted, Twice Shy are said prince's sexy butch assistant (Likotsi) and an unrelated femme second-generation Haitian-American (Fabiola).

I really liked each of the main characters and their dynamic-- one of the most important aspects of romances for me!-- which I was worried might be lacking when I found out it was a spin-off. In retrospect maybe that was silly of me... so often the side characters in books are my faves!

I also thought the backgrounds of the characters were really well done. I appreciated that there's a bit of culture clash between the two leads without it being a painful aspect of their relationship, and I was very impressed with how Fabiola's background informed her character and the story without defining her. As the child of an immigrant I find that a lot of stories fail to hit that balance for me-- either it's not present at all (fine, but of course it feels nice to see my experiences Represented) or it completely takes over to the point where it's unpleasant to read or otherwise not what I'm looking for in a casual read.

To me Once Ghosted, Twice Shy had the perfect balance of all that. Although I have very little in common with Fabiola, details in her experience from the immigrant-family perspective let me connect with her in a refreshing way, and definitely enhanced my enjoyment of the book.

There's some edits I would have made personally (I thought the opening could have been a little stronger; I didn't like some language choices, such as always referring to "the dating app" on which they met) but felt very satisfied by the time I finished the whole thing.

I really liked listening to the audiobook; I think the narrator not only had a very nice voice, but also did a great job conveying the two characters without going over the top. The two leads also have different accents which I could imagine would be harder to envision if you were just reading it. That being said, there were spicy parts of the book which I didn't realize going in, which came close to being an embarrassing surprise as I was not wearing headphones!

Recommended for:

people that think they'll enjoy a well-contained, thoughtful short story that focuses on a specific window of time in a romantic arc
people that like realistic portrayals of two competent, likable adults working out a relationship together
people that like butch/femme relationships with a very balanced dynamic
people that like when femmes top and butches bottom
people that enjoy representations of inter-cultural relationships and/or second-generation American experiences

Not recommended for:

people that want an epic sprawling romance
people that primarily want problematic/taboo elements in their romance/erotica
people that may be triggered by descriptions of the unjust treatment of immigrants in the United States