Crystallinegirl

So much happens in this book. Actually, too much happens in this book. Eden Conquered falls victim to something a lot of fantasies fall victim to - too many events in too short of a time, with hand-waving to explain the timing. Princess Carys is supposedly “wandering the wilderness” after faking her death in the previous book, Dividing Eden. She's also supposed to be recovering from the withdrawal effects of the drug she was taking to cover the pain of being semi-regularly beaten while at home. (I'm not even going to get into why she, a Princess, was regularly beaten...it's weird.) And yet, beyond a few pages in the beginning, she doesn't seem to have any issues with the withdrawal, and the “wilderness” is never more than two day's horseback ride from anywhere she seems to need to get to. The “War” that we keep hearing about we never see in either book. The battlefield is...somewhere else. There's no real sense of time or distance, when it really feels as if there SHOULD be.

That aside, it's a pretty good sequel to Dividing Eden. I think it would have been more satisfying to have been a trilogy, with the second book about Carys wandering in exile and Andreus dealing with the treachery in his kingdom, and the third book about Carys coming back to Garden City and reuniting with her brother. Perhaps we could have delved more into what the Xhelozi monsters are, and why the city is based on “Virtues.” That's another problem I had, actually - they say, more than once, that the Xhelozi are strong because the Virtue of the city is weak, but never explain that. We don't really get into the mythology much. Had the duology been a trilogy, perhaps we could have explored their religion more as well. There's so much interesting world-building dangled just out of sight! As is, with only 300 pages, a secret is barely dangled in front of us before it's revealed, and tension doesn't have a chance to build properly.

It's a great story. It needed more space to be fleshed out.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

What defines a person? Your experiences? Your personality? The emotional bonds you forge? What happens when you forget? Are you still you if you don't remember who that is? The Book of M tackles these questions and takes an intimate look at what happens when some people forget but others remember.

We enter on Max and Ory in an abandoned hotel, running out of food and supplies. Max has lost her shadow, which means she will soon start forgetting. Everything. (There are rumors that Shadowless have died because they forgot to breathe or eat.) We learn it's been a few years since the phenomenon started happening, and flashbacks tell us the story of those early months. Like any good dystopia, it is a world-altering process. Governments are gone because no one remembered to run them. Food and other supplies are dwindling because farmers, shippers, manufacturers forgot what they were doing and how to do it.

But with the forgetting comes - magic, of a sort. Ory comes across a deer in the forest that instead of antlers, has wings sprouting from its forehead. Because someone forgot that deer shouldn't have wings - and so it happened. Forgetting that something can be destroyed can make it indestructible. Forgetting that you left a place can take you back to that place. Forgetting a place exists can make that place no longer exist. It's not a very controllable kind of magic. And it's dangerous - you can never be quite sure what you'll forget, and you can affect other people with it.

And the forgetting starts with losing your shadow. Ory gives Max a tape recorder, so she can record things she might forget. He posts signs around their hideout to remind her of things, like “Let no one in. Ory has a key.” and “Don't touch the guns or the knives.” But Max knows she is a danger to Ory, and so while she can still remember enough to function, she runs away.

The book mostly concerns Ory and Max's journeys across the country; Max trying to find something she's forgotten, and Ory trying to find Max. The adventure is gripping, heartbreaking, and at times confusing. (Mostly on Max's end, as magic warps things around her.) There are a few side characters who also have viewpoint chapters. Naz Ahmadi is an Iranian girl training for the Olympics in the US - in archery, which comes in quite handy. We also have The One Who Gathers, a mysterious man in New Orleans who has gathered a flock of shadowless.

If you ever played the roleplaying game Mage: the Ascension, and remember the concept of Paradox, this book reminds me of that a lot. (Is it a surprise that I'm a tabletop RPG geek? It shouldn't be. I own almost all of the old World of Darkness books, and currently play in a D&D game, and hopefully soon a second D&D game!) Anyway. Paradox. Where doing magic too far outside the bounds of acceptable reality punishes you, so you have to weigh the potential consequences against the magic you want to do.

I really enjoyed this debut novel; it is a very original take on a dystopia, and raised a lot of questions about personality, memories, and what makes a person the person you remember.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

So I obviously didn't read the description of this book closely enough, because it wasn't until I hit “One For Sorrow - A Clockwork Dynasty Story” that I realized this was the same author that wrote Clockwork Dynasty, a book I read last year! We'll blame it on my goldfish memory. My goldfish memory is a large part of why I keep this blog, so I can look back and remember what I've read and what I thought about it! I randomly plucked this book off the New Book display while grabbing my holds from the library; I didn't recognize the author's name at the time. So I'm highly amused.

These stories are . . . hard to quantify.  Some of them I really enjoyed - “Miss Gloria” is probably my favorite - she's a little girl with a robot guardian. When kidnappers disable the guardian and take her, the guardian's programming jumps to the closest possible hardware - being the getaway car. From there to one of the kidnappers' smart helmets, and so on. I very much disliked “The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever” but to say why would spoil it entirely. The Clockwork Dynasty short story was quite good - I'm still hoping he'll write another full-length novel in that world.

I haven't read his other novel, Robopocalypse, and I wasn't thrilled with the short story from that universe, but the synopsis of it sounds amazing. I don't know if I want to read it or not!

This was a fascinating, if weird, collection of stories. I like how he explores the possible consequences of things like teleportation, AIs, robots, and battle armor. As a race, our capacity for invention tends to outpace our consideration of the consequences. We try to figure out how to do a thing before stopping to consider if we should. In this book, over and over again, I feel that Wilson is asking us “Is this the future we want?” which has often been the case with truly visionary science fiction. That's why people complaining about politics in science fiction make me laugh - science fiction has ALWAYS been political!

This is a book for mature audiences. There are deaths, sacrifices, pain, sex, war, and other mature themes - it's definitely not the lightest of reads. But it's good.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I almost bailed on this book. It's not bad, exactly, it's just - mediocre. Mia discovers that she is the thing she's been taught to hate, discovers that maybe they're not all bad, that what she's been taught is probably wrong, but, y'know, maybe not entirely wrong - it's just one trope after another. It was rather predictable.

And there's this problem with the world. If every woman is suspected of being a witch, (sorry, Gwyrach) and they work their magic through touch - how is anyone having kids? Sure, women are required to wear gloves in public, but - the touch-magic doesn't keep men from abusing women. Not like in The Power, where men start getting actually scared to touch women for fear of what could happen.

The only character in this book that I actually LIKED was Prince Quin. And maybe Dom, the flirtatious gay boy. Mia was rather thoroughly unlikable. First she blindly accepts that she should hate and kill Gwyrach, then is appalled to find out she (and her mother) are/were Gwyrach, and refuses to accept that because of course she can't possibly be one of those reviled women. She refuses to take Quin into her confidence, despite him showing blind trust in her for most of the book. What does he have to do to prove himself to you, woman?

I've read much better feminist dystopias. This is oppressed-women-finding-their-hidden-powers-and-fighting-back clothed in a fantasy instead of a dystopia, and it's not nearly as good as it could be. Despite ending on a cliffhanger, I don't care enough about these characters to read the next book.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

As I mentioned on Friday, this book is the prequel to Of Fire and Stars, so I read it first, even though it was published second. I prefer to read in chronological order when I can.

Inkmistress follows Asra, a demigod of unknown parentage, as she first follows and then is chased by her lover-turned-dragon who is intent on vengeance for the destruction of her village. Her lover, Ina, is convinced it is the King's fault that the village was destroyed, as he's been letting bandits roam over the outer reaches of his kingdom unchecked. So after taking on the form of a dragon, she's off to kill him to avenge her family. Asra is trying to talk Ina out of it, and chases her across the country, from their remote mountain to the inner forests and cities.

I really love Asra. Ina's kind of a bitch, but Asra is loving and funny and just an awesome person, fighting to protect herself and those she loves, even as those she loves evolve and change past what she can hold onto. Her magic takes a terrible price if she uses it, both on her and on the rest of the world. She has to wrestle with so many unknowns - her parentage, her magic, the world off her mountain, politics, other demigods - and somehow she manages to land on her feet. (Though not without help!)

The romance is sweet, and I love the emphasis on chosen families. Both Asra and Ina appear to be bisexual, which also doesn't appear to be unusual in this world. Reviews of Of Fire and Stars complain about the lack of worldbuilding, which is NOT a problem in this book. Perhaps I'll have an easier time having read this book first; which is a bit of a problem - you shouldn't have to read a prequel to understand the setting of the first book in a series! It does make me glad I'm reading them in this order, though.

I really loved this book. The urgency of the chase really came through in the story - Asra had to get to certain places and get certain things done before certain times, and obstacles thrown in her way made you worry she wouldn't get things done in time. It was well-written, with good character development of Asra, at least, and great world-building.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

Let's head into Christmas with something out of the ordinary, shall we? This was one heck of a dark fairytale, set in West Virginia, in a town where everyone knows everyone and the head of police is in cahoots with the local crime lord.

The story opens on Christmas Eve with Jesse Walker, failed husband and father, depressed, alone, and contemplating suicide, until he sees Santa Claus attacked and fleeing into the sky, leaving behind his magic sack. What he doesn't know is that Santa's attackers are mostly after the magic sack, and what he thinks is his salvation turns out to be what traps him into everything that follows.

And what follows is a thrillride! Jesse is roped into being one of Krampus' servants, along with his belsnickels, people Krampus has lent a portion of his magic to. The magic twists them into fur-covered monsters, but also grants them healing and near-immortality.

Between trying to rekindle the lost traditions of Yule and hunting down Santa Claus to end him for good, Jesse also struggles to save his wife and daughter from the possibly-murderous cop they're living with.

By the end of the book I wasn't sure who to cheer for, other than Jesse and one of the belsnickels, Isabel. But Krampus? He might be right, but is he good? I'm not sure. Similarly, except for his millennia-past misdeeds, Santa is good NOW. But I'm not sure he's right. In an ideal world, the two of them could come to some compromise and apologize to each other, but this is a dark fairytale, so of course that's not the case!

I enjoyed this book, even if there wasn't a lot of happiness in it. It definitely embodies the Appalachia Gothic idea.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I always pick up new polyamory books, and this one is excellent. Sophie simply tells the story of her love life, from falling in love with other boys while dating someone as a teen, to consciously deciding to date another couple, as a couple, in her adulthood. She doesn't pretend it was all roses, though. She hurt people unintentionally when she was younger, and struggled with jealousy in a number of different ways.

I liked that she was so real. She didn't shy away from talking about her heartbreaks, and the situations she found herself in sound all too likely. I also really liked the illustrations. The cover is a good indication of the style within - almost comic-book like. Rather than going with the story, the illustrations are part OF the story - she asks her boyfriend a question, his answer is in the illustration, and then the story continues in text. There's a chart of types of jealousy, drawn in the illustration style rather than perfect text boxes. Then you get owls asking each other “Whooooo is your favorite?” It gives the book almost a playful feel.

One thing I really liked is how she talked about friendships and polyamory. In a typical monogamous marriage, (not all!) there are rules about cheating. If you cuddle another person, or spend the night with them, that's probably cheating, even if it's platonic. In polyamory, though, there's a lot more leeway for how relationships can look. Sophie, for a good portion of the book, lives with a couple who are her best friends. She climbs into bed with them for comfort. They have dinner together, and tell each other “I love you.” I really love that she talks about friendships in the context of polyamory; I don't think that gets discussed often enough. I feel like being polyamorous lets friendships evolve as they will, instead of being constrained by your romantic relationships. If I have a friend who I like to cuddle up on the couch with and watch movies, my husband sees nothing wrong with that.

I plan to buy this book to add to my polyamory shelf. If you're polyamorous or curious about the relationship style, I highly recommend this book. She also has chapter notes, a bibliography, and an index in the back of the book, so it's stuffed full of other resources, too.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

This will just be a quick one, as this is your normal smutty romance novel. I picked it up for the PopSugar prompt “Based on Halloween” and it is that. But it's also the typical “lust at first sight and the sex is so good that they get to know each other and just happen to be absolutely perfect for each other.” The cover blurb makes it sound like most of the plot revolves around mistaken identities, and that is absolutely not true. I'm also not sure where that cover comes in, because the woman dresses up as a warrior princess, not a gothic lady. Sooooooo that's questionable.

I have issues with the “deciding not to use condoms in the heat of the moment without actually discussing it with each other” and only really talking about it after the fact, but, sure, don't let realism keep you from enjoying a good (and pretty hot) smutty novel.

The bonus first two chapters of Collision Course in the end of this book did more to make me want to read more of this author's work than the entire rest of the novel did. shrug It's a decent bit of smutty fluff, but nothing outstanding.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

Comedic collection of essays about feminism? Yeah, I'm in. I was actually unaware of Erin Gibson prior to this book; she's apparently pretty popular as one of the personalities on a podcast named Throwing Shade. But she's got a way with words, and a sharp undercurrent of anger under the jokes, which happens to be just the way I like my political comedy.

That said, there wasn't really anything new in this book. It's the same ranting I've seen millions of times on Facebook and Twitter and online editorials. I really enjoyed her summary of the annual ob/gyn visit. I just didn't find it all that original.

She's got some amazing chapter titles - “THE TERRIFYING PROSPECT OF MIKE ‘VAGINAS ARE THE DEVIL'S MOUTH FLAPS' PENCE” for example, or “EVERYONE HAS A CHOICE . . . UNLESS YOU'RE A WOMAN AND IT'S BEEN TAKEN AWAY FROM YOU.” She sums up a lot of topics that fledgling feminists might not know many details about, from abortion rights to sexist dress codes to teen abstinence pledges. But for the well-read, politically informed feminist that I try to be, I didn't get much out of this book.

So - funny, yes. Sharp, angry wit, yes. Worth taking up space on my list when I have SO MANY other things to read? Not really.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I don't tend to read a lot of contemporary fiction, but I had several on my beach read/summer reading list, and this one is set in Rockville, Maryland, which is pretty close to where I live. Having read it finally, I wouldn't call it a beach read, though!

Number One Chinese Restaurant follows the owners and staff of The Beijing Duck House before and after a devastating fire. There's a lot of chinese culture revealed in the book, from familial obligation to amending names with an Ah- prefix, to the immigration process to America, to knowing what region someone is from by their accent and forming opinions of them based on that. (Although I suppose we do that in the US, too - that last one might be universal.)

We start with the two brothers, Jimmy and Johnny. Jimmy is the current owner of the Duck House, while Johnny is out of the country for the first part of the book. The two brothers are opposites in most ways, with Jimmy being the back-of-house hardliner and Johnny being the diplomatic schmoozer.

(Speaking of back-of-house, this book PEGGED restaurant life. I've worked in food service quite a lot, and from the chaos of rushes to the drug and alcohol abuse, to the confusion between front and back of house but at the same time feeling like you're all in it together - yeah. This book NAILS it.)

From Jimmy and Johnny, we have their strong-willed mother, Feng, and her cousin, “Uncle” Pang, who has mysterious connections and can get things done but isn't exactly benevolent about it. The last member of the immediate family is Annie, Johnny's daughter. There is a staff chart in the inside cover of the book to help keep everyone straight, and it's quite handy, because then we get into the staff. There's really two main plotlines going, though they revolve around each other and intertwine in places. There's Johnny's efforts to open a new restaurant, and then there's Nan and Ah-Jack.

Nan and Ah-Jack have both been working at the Duck House for thirty years, and have married other people but have always adored each other. As the restaurant enters crisis, so do their personal lives, and things get messy.

In order for me to like contemporary fiction, there have to be personal hooks that interest me, and this book hit food service, minorities, and the local area. That was more than enough to make it an enjoyable read.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I've seen the movie based on Patrick Ness's previous book, A Monster Calls, but I haven't actually read the book. I definitely see similarities in style between the two stories, though. The blurb calls it “lyrical” and “haunting” but I'd call them both trippy.

In And The Ocean Was Our Sky, the story is told from the viewpoint of Bathsheba, a whale. In her world, whales and humans have been at war as long as she can remember. Whales have learned the human language, and how to build ships and use harpoons. (Though how they actually DO these things with flippers is never explained. Just suspend disbelief and go with it.)

I think the hardest thing to wrap my mind around was the whales have an inverted view of gravity. To them, the human world of air is called the Abyss, and it lives below them. The ocean is, well, their sky, as the title says. Bathsheba mentions the dizzying moment when she breaches and the world turns on its axis as gravity changes around her. When the whales talk of swimming up, they mean deeper into the ocean, or down, to us.

It's a crazy, inverted, fantastical world, and you just have to go with it. The illustrations both help and confuse further, but I think the fever-dream feel of it is intentional.

Bathsheba and her pod are hunters of men, and they come across a sign from Toby Wick. (You know, instead of Moby Dick.) Toby Wick is a devil in the eyes of both men and whales, and Bathsheba's captain, Captain Alexandra, resolves to hunt him down once and for all and rid the oceans of his menace. On the way, Bathsheba talks to their human captive and learns not all men are hunters, and they have dreams and fears just like whales do. Disturbed, she begins to question her own morality, and what makes someone a devil.

The book is a quick read at 160 pages, probably half of which are full-page illustrations. But it is magical and surreal and well worth reading.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

This is an interesting collection of essays because it's drawn from the author's previous work, so some of the essays are a little...dated. Each essay is preceded by a few paragraphs about it, though, talking about what was going on when Orenstein wrote the essay, or how the subject has changed since the essay was written, so instead of being out-of-touch, it's more like a historical look back in time. Some of the essays even update other essays! In particular, one essay is about her first fight with breast cancer, and beating it, and a second essay is about when the cancer comes back years later. Similarly, there are essays about her issues with infertility and miscarriages, and later about being a mother.

I really enjoyed these articles, especially since I was reading the book while sick, and 3 or 4 page essays were about the limits of my attention span! I could sit down and read one (or two, if I was feeling particularly good) and actually absorb the contents. I tried to read a novel and wound up setting it aside because I couldn't focus! I enjoy keeping anthologies and short story collections in my stack for that reason. Sometimes I just need something I can take in small bits, and this fit the bill nicely.

The essays ranged from profiles of remarkable women (Caitlin Moran, Gloria Steinem, Atsuko Chiba) to essays on the author's personal life, to essays about our educational system, sexism in daily life, and intimate issues like cancer and infertility. It's a wide range of topics, but all dealing with being a woman, and/or having a uterus. There are a couple of essays in the very back about masculinity, but it's mostly a woman-centered book. That doesn't mean men shouldn't read it, quite the opposite! While the book isn't quite as engrossing as some of the other feminist nonfiction I've been reading lately, it's still quite good, and does deal with topics that I don't see discussed often, like breast cancer and IVF, so it might be more interesting to people who have a personal connection to those topics. Well worth reading, though!

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

This incredibly cute queer romance was the YA_Pride Book Club pick this month on Twitter. What I didn't expect when I picked it up was just HOW GOOD the representation is in this book. First, Ollie, the main love interest, is deaf, and communicates via ASL or written word. This isn't a huge deal; people just work around it, which is really lovely. There's a lot of passing phones around with things typed out on them, plus lip-reading and some limited use of signs, many of them described on the page for the reader.

The other amazing representation is how the book treats bisexuality. Both Nate and his best friend Flo are bi; they dated each other before the beginning of the book, but Flo is dating a woman when the book opens, and Nate has a huge crush on Ollie. This is not treated as weird, or even remarkable enough to be noted. They just are interested in more than one gender and it's completely normal. I love it.

The story itself is really cute; Ollie was a childhood best friend that Nate had a crush on, and he's come back to town several years later. Turns out Nate's crush still exists, and the boys start an awkward romance. Nate is the kind of overthinker that constantly sabotages his own happiness, and we see that play out in more than just his relationship with Ollie.

I also really liked that the book didn't play into the “the first time with the right person is magical and perfect” trope when it comes to sex. No, first times are awkward and sometimes not all that pleasurable, even with the right person. But with the right person, you can get past the awkwardness and try again. It was a much more realistic first sexual experience, I think.

This book was a quick read, with great minority rep, from racial to sexual to disability rep. The story was great. I liked also that the romance wasn't the only focus of the story; Nate's relationships with his friends were also important to the plot. Great book.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

This is the sequel to The Girl with the Red Balloon - though chronologically, it actually takes place first. Since it mostly deals with different characters in related but different events, though, it doesn't really read like a prequel. Really the only bad thing I have to say is that it didn't answer the question of what happened at the end of Girl with the Red Balloon, and to be honest, I don't actually mind. Spy could be read as a completely standalone book and be just as satisfying. There's very little overlap between the two books, even though they deal with similar themes, in the same world.

I personally think SPY is better than GIRL, but I find that a lot with second books. I think authors tend to have a little more confidence by the second book; they know a little more about their world. They've gotten feedback from readers about what worked and what didn't in the first book, and can somewhat adjust course based on that if they're good. And Locke is excellent. I really liked GIRL, don't get me wrong, but I LOVED SPY. The characters were fantastic, and the way she addressed Wolf's demisexuality was perfect.

The book is set in a time when being gay was straight-up illegal, and one of Wolf's fellow spies asks him about it because it was apparently in his file. He tells her there's no evidence of that because he doesn't feel that way about ANYONE. (He's lying, but we'll get to that.) He can appreciate when people are attractive, but he doesn't feel desire that way - except for one person. One person, who he'd known for years and been best friends with before those feelings showed themselves. They'd never acted on it, which is why there's no evidence of it. Demisexual is on the asexual spectrum, and as such it varies wildly in terms of how sexual a person is, but Wolf's demisexuality is the closest I've seen in fiction to my own, so it's really special to me.

Veering away from representation specific to me, SPY, like GIRL, stars Jewish people at its heart. This time we have a pair of Jewish siblings from America, each fighting in WW II in their own way. Ilse with her brain, helping develop magic for the US, and Wolf more directly, sneaking around Germany and disrupting their forces. GIRL dealt more with the oppressed German Jews, while SPY shows us the other side - the Jews who are fighting back for their kin, even though they could stay in the US and be safe.

Both books are excellent reads. I've had the fortune to interact with Katherine Locke on Twitter quite a lot, and at this point I will pretty much read anything she publishes. I love her characters and her plotlines and the obvious care she takes with the representation. Fantastic book.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

So I knew this was inspired by Jim Henson's Labyrinth. That's partially why I picked it up, as I love that movie and David Bowie as the Goblin King. I didn't expect to get, basically, Labyrinth fanfiction. That was my first impression. As the book carries on, though, and especially as you get into the second book, it's more like a musician's fever-dream of their favorite childhood movie. There are so many elements taken from the movie, but they are deconstructed and put back together in such unexpected ways.

You'll recognize a line or two from the movie. The fairies still bite. The Goblin King is still beautiful and angular and strange. Liesl's after a stolen sibling. But Liesl and her family live in rural, probably 18th century Bavaria. She is not a spoiled, baby-sitting half-sister. Her grandmother has taught her the old stories, and unbeknownst to her, she's played music for The Goblin King her entire childhood.

The first book concerns Liesl's first foray into the Underground to save her sister when The Goblin King steals her to be his bride. This is where the acid trip starts. If you're familiar with Labyrinth, remember the ballroom scene? With people whirling about and appearing and disappearing and mirrors and the sense of disorientation as it all falls apart? Yeah, that's basically the entire time in the Underground. Though there is a ball scene, and it is especially trippy.

While Liesl manages to save her sister (that's a spoiler, but it isn't much of one), she has a harder time saving herself. Whether she actually does or not could be debated.

The second book of the duology, Shadowsong, has an interesting author's note in the front of it. The author first gives a content warning for self-harm, suicidal ideations, addiction, and reckless behaviors. She goes on to say Liesl has bipolar disorder, and further, that so does she. (The author.) She says Wintersong was her bright mirror, and Shadowsong her dark one. I can see that. Wintersong is a much happier book than Shadowsong, but the story would be incomplete without both books. Wintersong does end in a satisfactory conclusion, but Shadowsong just completes the tale in a way that I, at least, really enjoyed.

Shadowsong also contains more throwbacks to the movie - she falls and is caught by goblin hands; goblins form a giant face that talks to her about the old laws. These things don't happen in the same scene, though.

I loved the elements of music woven throughout the story; Liesl is a composer, and music - her music - is almost a character in its own right. It's definitely a huge plot element. It's in her connection to her brother, and her connection to The Goblin King. It's her way into the Underground, and her way out, and her way to reach back in.

It's an enchanting duology; I don't know if it would be as good for someone who didn't love Labyrinth the way I do. If you dislike the movie, I would probably advise against reading these. But if you like it or have simply never seen it, these would be good, atmospheric books to read in the dead of winter.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I'm starting to realize I might have a thing for lady necromancers. They're the right kind of dark, badass, I'm-going-to-do-the-right-thing-even-if-you-don't-understand-it amazing women that I love. From Tea in The Bone Witch trilogy to Odessa in Reign of the Fallen to Jetta in this book, these women are amazing. I have one more lady necromancer book out from the library right now, Give The Dark My Love, and I hope it lives up to the rest of these women!

So in For A Muse of Fire, we have Jetta, with amazing powers but also with what she refers to as her malheur - she's bipolar. She and her parents are traveling to another country to seek a cure for it, but in their journeys they wind up in the middle of a rebellion. Her powers let her see wandering spirits, bind them to physical objects, and command them. In this way, she's made shadow puppets that don't require strings or sticks, and her family has a small amount of fame as the best shadow puppeteers in the region.

We learn secrets about Jetta's family, ancestry, and just how far her powers can go, while she fights off army deserters, generals, smugglers, and ghosts. She imbues unexpected objects with unexpected spirits (one such instance being the best scene in the book, in my opinion).

I can't wait for the next book. Jetta is maturing into her powers and deciding what to do with them, and once she makes up her mind the world is going to shudder at her feet.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I picked this one up because of the mention of the online roleplaying game. Somewhat disappointingly, the book spends almost no time actually in the game. We're told that Analee used to escape into the game all the time, but in the book itself we see her putting aside the game for “real life”, over and over again. I was expecting her to be more reluctant to leave it.

That aside, this is a great YA book about adjusting to changes in family life and social pressures at school. The clique and rumor mill and popular kids are all there, with Analee on the outside - until she agrees to fake-date Seb. We watch as she goes from being invisible to being known at school, and how that affects her.

Analee's also dealing with the impending wedding of her dad and his girlfriend, two years after Analee's mother died, and all the emotions that brings up.

It's a cute YA book, with a lot of character development, but the part of it that drew me didn't get as much screen-time as I was expecting, so it just wasn't really my cup of tea.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I don't read a lot of hard sci-fi. It's just not where my interests lie. But every once in a while, I do enjoy a good space opera. Firefly/Serenity (before I learned about the Confederate connection, dammit), Dark Matter, even the occasional episode of The Expanse. Tim Pratt has written a fantastic space opera in his Axiom series. (The Forbidden Stars should be coming out sometime in 2019.) The story started with The Wrong Stars and continues here.

First, the diversity is fantastic. The crew runs the gamut of genders, sexualities, ethnicities, and religions. Our two main characters, Captain Machedo and Elena, are both bisexual women, and the Captain is also demisexual. (One of the first things she does in this book is crash her own funeral being held by her ex-husband!) I enjoyed seeing Elena and Callie's relationship continue to grow.

Second, the dialog is hilarious. The Captain and her ship's AI are both smart alecks, and sarcasm and snappy comebacks abound.

The action is also very well-done; the physics of traveling through space aside, most of the science is feasible. All of the Axiom-tech is pretty far out, and some of the other science is....well it's such a long shot that it only worked because it's in a book, but it IS conceivable it could work.

This is one sci-fi series I will continue to watch for. (And I wonder how long before it gets optioned for TV?)

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

Another quick novella, Taste of Marrow is the sequel to the bizarre alternate history novella River of Teeth. It picks up a few months after the ending of the first - people have had a chance to heal their injuries from the explosive ending of the first book, and hippos have begun to spread to previously safe waterways. The cast of this book consists of the surviving characters from the first, plus only one more semi-important character.

It's not quite as good as the first - no explosions and it's less of a rollercoaster - but there is some character development, and a deeper exploration of a few characters than we saw in the first book. I wish my library had the omnibus edition, because it includes two short stories set in the same world, and I'm very curious which aspects of the world she explored in those.

But this is a fun pair of books, very quick, easy reads, and it's just fun to say you're reading a book about hippos and cowboys!

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I'm a baker. I absolutely love baking, it centers me when I'm being scatter-brained and grounds me when I'm in a bad mood. So I instantly identified with Rosie in this novel, who wants to be a pastry chef, currently at a culinary school that focuses more on cooking savory things. I've been there. Granted, my culinary school was basically a crash course two-year program at a community college, not “the most prestigious cooking program for teens in the entire world” but I identify with the feeling of being a fish not-quite-out of water. I'd also never seen this put into words before:

“...it was that not knowing that Rosie hated. That was why she loved baking. Baking was all knowing. If you followed the recipe, you got exactly what you intended. An apple pie never surprisingly turned into lemon meringue halfway through the baking process.”

I have some mild anxiety, and I hadn't realized WHY baking helped, just that it did. But it's true - baking is about knowing. That quote is in the second chapter, and I knew from then on I was going to love this book. (I was already pretty sure, but that moment drove it home.)

The descriptions of food in this novel - food and cooking, and WHY some people cook - are mouth-watering. I loved seeing the backgrounds of the various culinary students, as they came from all over the world to École Denis Laurent, the prestigious school in Paris. I liked the point made, eventually, that what looks like the “cool kids clique” from outside might not be what it seems. The book even addressed toxic masculinity in the form of Henry's unwillingness to ask for help from his friends when he was struggling.

At its heart, Love à la Mode is a sweet, fluffy, clean romance with a romantic backdrop of Paris and good food. Sometimes a little bit of happy, lighthearted escapist fiction is what we all need. Especially when it doesn't neglect representation to do it - there's only a tiny bit of LGBT+ rep in the book, but the characters come from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

This is the sequel to Forest of a Thousand Lanterns, and where Forest was about the rise of the Empress - or the evil stepmother from Snow White - this book is solidly about Snow White. Or Jade, in this case. I enjoyed Forest, but Kingdom is spectacular! It's hard to like Xifeng in Forest, where she continually makes the decisions that drag her deeper into the evil god's clutches. Jade, however, is sweet and determined and loyal and good. She is easy to love, and worthy of it. We see a few characters from the first book coming back to help Jade in her quest, and I loved seeing how they had grown in the intervening years.

I do feel like the romantic storyline was kind of shoehorned in. Jade falls in love with no real reason for it. We don't see what's so fantastic about her love interest, he isn't shown as doing anything outstanding, he's just kind of there and the first male person she's spent time with. I get why he fell in love with Jade, Jade is amazing. He's just so bland. So that felt a little odd.

I did enjoy the magic cloak and the quest and the final battle. The scene between Ming and Xifeng at the end was absolutely heartbreaking and made me love Ming even more. He might be my favorite character from both books.

Bottom line, this is an excellent sequel to Forest of a Thousand Lanterns, and I think it's better than the first book. You could probably read it without reading Forest, but some of the reveals won't mean nearly as much, and you'll miss all the background that makes Xifeng so interesting.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

You Have The Right To Remain Fat is a short manifesto on why society needs to change the way it treats fat people, and that we don't need to lose weight to fit into society. Tovar talks about the sexism, classism, and racism that is often behind fatphobia and discrimination, the way culture has shifted around looks, and feeling comfortable in your own skin. She rips diet culture to shreds, shining a spotlight on the gaslighting technique that is heavy in dieting language. (You're not losing weight because you're not doing it right. You don't have enough willpower to deprive yourself of essential nutrients? Shame on you.)

I could understand people being offended by this book - she basically says if you're trying to lose weight for the sake of losing weight, you're wrong. But if you really look at it, if that really is all you're losing weight for, to be thin, shouldn't society accept you as you are? If you need to lose weight for actual, valid health reasons, that's different. But if it's just for the sake of being thin - maybe rethink your reasons.

I'm going back on the Auto Immune Protocol as soon as we settle in to the new house - and while losing weight is a nice side effect, I'm doing it to control autoimmune symptoms. And in all the literature around AIP, it's about not feeling fatigued or nauseous. It's about getting your digestive system back on track and reducing the chronic pain. It's NOT about losing weight, though people often do lose weight on it because it boosts the metabolism and cuts sugar. (Although it's also used for hyperthyroid people, who often have unhealthy weight loss, so really it's about stabilizing your weight!)

One of the most interesting parts of the book was when she discussed a conference she'd gone to and talked to women about fatphobia and inferiority complexes. First she asked if anyone there felt inferior. Of course, no one did. But then she asked a series of follow-up questions that pointed out behaviors born of feelings of inferiority. Things like: “Are you wearing something physically uncomfortable because you believe it makes you look better? Today did you refuse to do something you wanted to do because you were worried how it would make you look to someone?”

Out of curiosity, I read all the questions (there were eight or so) to my husband. He'd done exactly one of them. I have done all of them in the past, and still do some. (I'm currently a housewife. I don't wear uncomfortable clothes.) It was rather eye-opening.

You Have The Right To Remain Fat is a quick, thought-provoking read that is uncomfortable at times but also makes you want to shout HELL YES at other times. I definitely recommend it.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I try to be very mindful when reviewing books on autism, or other #ownvoices books that I'm not part of the demographic. They're very important books for people who are not of that demographic to read - that's how we learn about each other - but we get into iffy territory when reviewing them. It can be problematic to be critical when you're not the target audience. For Autism in Heels I don't have that problem, because this is a really good book! I'm sure autistic people will still get more out of it that I did, and female autistics even more. But there were paragraphs that definitely reminded me of my husband, and we had several good conversations inspired by this book. (“What makes a good friend?” being one of the more interesting ones.)

Jenny tells an engrossing story of her life; interwoven with facts and anecdotes about female autistics in general were specific examples from her life, and both problems she'd faced because she was autistic, and problems everyone faces that were particularly problematic for her as an autistic. Much like my husband, she comes at stories sideways, giving several details and tangents before getting to the point that ties them all together. That's much easier to deal with in print; I often have to stop my husband, specifically ask him where he's going with his story, and then let him get back to all the surrounding details. Knowing that he DOES THAT lets us deal with it in a manner that is less frustrating for both of us. (I get frustrated because I can't hold all the loose ends in my head without knowing how they connect, so once he gets to his point, I often have to make him repeat some of the earlier parts, and he gets frustrated because I can't follow his train of thought.) In text form, I can skim forward when I need to and come back to the earlier tangents. I suspect she also had an excellent editor, because that only gets confusing a few times. (Or she did it herself in revisions. Either way, it's far less confusing than a lot of conversations I've had with my husband!)

She does talk about some pretty intense domestic abuse from her college boyfriend near the end of the book, and then segues into eating disorders, so be aware of that. Those are both things that autistic women are particularly vulnerable to, and they definitely deserve a place in the book, but they can be difficult to read about, and my heart broke for college-Jennifer.

This is a great memoir of an amazing woman. I might need to look up her other books, even if they are targeted towards teens.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

This is the sequel to Bright Smoke, Cold Fire, in which we were introduced to Romeo Mahyanai and Juliet Catresou, and the city of Viyara. This book concentrates much more on Romeo and Juliet instead of Paris and Runajo/Rosaline, who were arguably the main characters of the first book.

So, as a quick recap, the city of Viyara/Verona is the last city anywhere in the world, as far as anyone in the city knows. A mystical event called The Ruining manifested as a white fog and spread over the entire world, killing everything in its path, and making the dead rise as zombies. The only reason Viyara stands is because some long-dead priestess managed to create mystical walls to protect it - but the walls are fueled by blood. Willing, sometimes coerced people are sacrificed on a regular basis to fuel the walls and keep the rest of the city safe. Juliet is not actually Juliet, but THE Juliet, a nameless girl raised and mystically bound to the clan of the Catresou, obedient to the head of the clan and bound to avenge any unnatural deaths of the family. She, however, falls in love with Romeo.

The first book plays out their love story, while seeing events around it through the eyes of Runajo and Paris. By the second book, Romeo and Juliet each think the other is dead, though Romeo has discovered that's a lie, Runajo has ideas about how to save the city from the Ruining, and Romeo and Juliet have switched sides. Her mystical bindings have been transferred to Romeo's clan, and Romeo, through guilt and remorse, has transferred his loyalties to Juliet's clan.

The second book concentrates on saving the city, the last bastion of humanity. There are zombies, and sacrifices, and sword fights, and stolen kisses. Things really get complicated when Romeo accidentally kills a Mahyanai and Juliet's mystical bindings kick in, compelling her to kill him. She operates under that compulsion for most of the last half of the book, while still being utterly in love with him and trying to fight the compulsion.

It's hard to do this book justice; the web is very complex and, like any Romeo and Juliet story, only ends in death. In Hodge's world, however, the mystical bindings on Juliet have made her a key to the land of death, allowing her to cross over while still alive. So we get a journey through Death's kingdom, and it is fascinating.

I won't say anymore, but if you like Shakespeare, and you like fantasy, you should totally read this duology.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I call this a graphic novel because that's really what it is - it's not a comic, though. Each spread of pages is a mixture of text and oil painting - sometimes just a painting.

If it was just the text, it would be a very lackluster book. There are aspects of the story that are unexplained, and aspects that are explained only by the accompanying paintings. It's really the paintings that make this book unique. It's almost like - an adult picture book, I suppose. It actually reads more like someone found the series of paintings and constructed a story to support what they imagined was happening in the pictures.

Regardless, it's a unique experience. Manchess is a remarkable artist. The paintings are gorgeous, and the book does that thing where the text and art play around each other on the page, creating unique formatting that helps tell the story on its own, like when a full two-page spread of a painting has two lines of text to emphasize them.

Fascinating, beautiful book.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.