No other installment in this trilogy has lived up to the first book, for me, but I still enjoyed this one a lot.

It's a bittersweet conclusion to an epic story. I enjoyed how immersive the worldbuilding was, and how we finally got some answers to questions that the first book had planted. 

I wanted to like this one, but it disappointed. Maybe it's because I just read an infinitely better novel centering Jewish folklore (When The Angels Left The Old Country by Sacha Lamb) and this one simply paled in comparison, making me rate it lower. Maybe my love of the traditional, Slavic Baba Yaga mythology made me less receptive of this version of her. In any case, I wish I had liked it, but in all honesty the best part of it (the only part that gave me shivers) is the prologue. It went downhill from there, for me.

Nethercott does have a knack with mimicking fables. Whenever a chapter from Thistlefoot's point of view came up, I was swept up by the lyrical, atmospheric writing. However, this backfires when she writes anything set in the real world. From the unrealistic, trope-y way the characters talk and interact, to the underdeveloped worldbuilding (mainly of the mutating houses, and the siblings' magic) that never quite managed to feel believable - things that work well for a fairytale don't translate fluently to a modern world like our own. Several plot threads are underdeveloped or simply forgotten:

the siblings' relationship with their parents is never resolved, or truly explained; Fen's death feels cheap; the aftermath of the final fight doesn't seem to have any long term effect on anyone, least of all Isaac, who found out he got resurrected and never addressed this

- these were some of my biggest gripes. Character development is rushed, Isaac

never truly atones for his treatment of Bellatine

, and the end feels too idyllic, compared to what Thistlefoot's narration seems to foreshadow with the constant "forgive them" interjections. The side characters are frustratingly flat, and feel like the least believable part of the whole narrative - why/how are the Dustbreakers so continuously involved? What do they even add to the plot? What stick does Shona have up her ass? What kind of chemistry is Sparrow cooking up? In the acknowledgements, Nethercott brings up her extensive research on every part of the book, from train hopping to the pogroms, and yet, amid these realistic depictions, there's Sparrow, making antidotes and purple sedative gas in the back of a schoolbus.

Also, I just don't like this version of Baba Yaga. Building her up as a creature of fable only to tear it all down and reveal her as

a normal, grief stricken woman

feels disappointing, to me, though maybe that's my own attachment to stories I heard as a child, clouding my judgement.

Finally, it just dragged. Too long of a work without much happening, a lot of clichés, and a cast of unlikeable characters that don't give us a reason to care, all made this book a slog.

Finished the webcomic today. I can't believe it's been going for 7 years. Maybe it's nostalgia (I found it in 2014, then lost the link and forgot all about it until now), but it's one of my favourite webcomics for sure.

An eerie, lyrical, and engaging debut of a book. The writing alternates between rich, evocative (though at times cliché) imagery and witty dialogue, brought to life very well by the audiobook narrator. I enjoyed this read, or listen, a fair bit.

It wasn't scary so much as chilling, especially as the mystery unravelled, but I still found it very visceral at times - a few of the dream sequences definitely gave me shivers. The themes of grief, escape, and family are explored in decent enough depth, and loss takes a central role within the story, both as an incorporeal concept and anthropomorphized as a mythological creature. I particularly liked that

"killing" it doesn't immediately make things better

; in the end, there's still work and healing Mackenzie has to do. 

I did feel like the story itself was sparse - often the case with novels that are "grown" out of short stories - so much so that the final conf ontation felt almost anticlimactic. I wish the characters and their relationships had been fleshed out more, too, especially with the thread of

dream magic

tying them all together. Make no mistake, family is a huge focus, but at times it feels superficially so, as a symbol and nothing else. I feel like that's the nature of debuts, though, and I'm looking forward to catch more of the author's writing out there someday!

I just rediscovered the webcomic! Oh my god it's such a good story, with some delightful worldbuilding.

I used to be a huge fan of the webcomic when it was first coming out, in 2014, but then lost the link - now, a decade later, I found it again! Yay!

I'm not sure about this one. The prose is beautiful, but the storyline itself lost me a few times, in part due to the dated style - I always struggle with classics.

Still, it's eerie, it's atmospheric, and I adored how evocative it was in its descriptions of Laura and Carmilla's interactions.

Dangit, 2024 only just started, and yet I think I already found one of my favourite reads of the year.

I don't want to compare it to Good Omens because that comparison has been made a bunch by other reviewers, but this book is a treat for any Good Ones fan. Between the whimsical narrative style with your standard Pratchett-esque omniscient narrator (that often teases the characters behind their backs, making inside jokes with the audience), the angel&demon duo at the heart of the book, and the endearing (yet strongheaded) supporting cast that doesn't fall by the wayside despite the book's main story already being fairly meaty, I was swept off my feet from the start.

A great comfort book for people that aren't into the "cozy" genre, I can't think of a person I wouldn't recommend it to.

This book was excruciating to get through. The author wants to be Becky Chambers so bad, but instead fails abysmally, producing a book that was as confused in its own moral as it was confusing to pick apart.

The writing itself was clunky (every page, someone is "grinning". Just say smile. Please just say smile), and there were more than a few spelling/grammar mistakes, but I can excuse that in a self-published work. 

However, the characters are just unlikeable. They live on Mars, a society that contrasts Earth's dystopian capitalistic hell with a seemingly utopian social paradise. They seem to have everything a leftist could ask for (I say this as a leftist) - free accessible healthcare, universal basic income, wide and far-reaching social support systems, legal bans on what and where you can advertise, sustainability in the materials used to build and source their homes/tools/clothes, and so much more; why are they all so abysmal at being people? One is friends with extremists that

attempt to murder someone later in the book

. Another spends most of the book dehumanizing a colleague that's coded autistic while committing what's considered borderline emotional abuse in this society: "bridging". The character that's coded autistic (or mentally ill in general - she has an "abnormal disposition", something that manifests as a lack of empathy, an aversion to social cues, and her brain not responding to human interaction as a reward) spends most of the book trying to convince other people that she's a human that's worthy of support in the way she interacts with the world. I wish I was kidding - it took someone until chapter 30 to empathise with the autistic-coded character enough to finally see her as human enough to be properly friends with, after blowing up at her for advovating for her condition in the workplace. Surely, a social utopia with adequate healthcare would educate its citizens on dispositional normativity?

The other character that's coded to be mentally ill, San (who has a form of PTSD and displays some anxiety symptoms) at first refuses to get someone life saving help because the PTSD makes them see him as an enemy; then is seen grappling with what's effectively PTSD-informed xenophobia about this other character that's from Earth. And the whole time, other characters ignore this very real issue and invite the Earthling to start a business with them. Sure, they ask San, but it's heavily implied that San only agrees to this because they're using it as some form of unregulated exposure therapy. And it works, but a part of me wonders what they would have done if it hadn't. Diego deserves better friends, honestly. Ones that ask him how HE is from time to time, actually, now that I think about it.

This treatment of both San and Dhapree (Dhapree being the autistic-coded character) by the plot and the other characters paints the two of them as the irrational ones. The book seems at times preachy, and at other times completely amoral, and I feel like the author should have just picked one. Everyone either talks in therapy speak, or blows up at each other in irrational fights. No inbetween. This is like the "are you in the right headspace to receive information that could possibly hurt you" joke from twitter, in book form. Are these characters supposed to be the paragon of communicating like mature adults, or a group of irrational morally gray friends trying to start a business together and running into social and emotional challenges? Pick one, Haché, please. Because they spend so long arguing and misunderstanding each other and calling each other's dispositions "inhuman", there's maybe only the last 100 pages for any character growth to happen in. It happens, but it's incredibly rushed. I refuse to accept that a huge, century-long systemic conflict that people are on different sides of can be solved neatly (in the minds of those people) so that they all get along now, in a mere 100 pages. And, in a case of "tell, not show", of course the book says that these issues are complicated and they don't 100% get along, but it shows that everything is dandy and that they do.

The worldbuilding was so dense that it was impossible to convey it to the reader without "telling" rather than "showing" - the author could have simplified it for better narrative flow, but instead he stuck through it and the result is overwhelmingly dry at times. I could care about narrotology or Martian politics in the hands of the right character, but, as outlined above, they don't seem to want us to care. When a large part of the book is either people explaining things to other people as a form of exposition (mostly the Martians to the Earthling, or the narrotologist to her colleagues), or just pure exposition from the point of view of one of the characters, the whole text can take a lot to get through.

I rarely encounter a book I don't want to recommend to anyone. But there are so many books that execute each of the tropes presented in A Slice of Mars better and with much more fluency: for coworkers being shoved into weird and fun emotionally charged situations and growing to love each other, see "The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet" by Becky Chambers or "The Animators" by Kayla Rae Whitaker; for a social utopia that works, see the "Monk and Robot" duology by Becky Chambers or "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin; for food-based antics, see "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" by Douglas Adams or "Legends & Lattes" by Travis Baldree; and for ways a dystopia and a utopia clash or social upheaval is caused to make one into another, see "Pet" by Akwaeke Emezi (and its prequel, "Bitter"), or "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley, or "An Unkindness of Ghosts" by Rivers Solomon.

That's how much I hated this book. I'm recommending you others to cleanse your palate.

First off, the author is actually my mother, so I'm not an impartial reviewer. I'm mentioned in the book a few times, and I also made the cover. The book was on GoodReads and not on StoryGraph, so I thought I'd add it and leave a review.

All of that said, I still think it's a poignant work about the nature of immigration (to the UK specifically, and in general). The author talks candidly and fluently about her own journey as an immigrant, navigating microaggressions, self-doubt, social isolation, and many more challenges immigrants will face in their attempts to seek a better life for themselves and their families. It's a work that inspires empathy, pride, and an appreciation for British culture from the point of view of someone discovering it for the first time. 

I'm incredibly proud of her for having written this book, and honored to have been a minor part of its creation. As an immigrant myself, first to the UK with her and now to Canada on my own, this book made me feel seen, in ways I didn't expect from a work that was, again, written by someone so close to me, someone that I thought had imparted all her wisdom onto me already.

I liked this one, but I wish there had been more of it - I feel like the world could use more development, and the characters - more growth, so that when the climax came it could be so much more of a sucker punch. 

This is a narrative that should have either been an epic, or stayed a short story or novella. I was immersed into this world and these characters, and I loved the magic system, but it all flew by. There was a lot of telling, rather than showing - it was hard to really root for the protagonist until later in the book, because they were just so dry. 

Still - wonderful prose, a non-binary aroace protagonist, a queer normative setting that doesn't feel saccharine, a stomach-churning final fight, and competent medical writing (I heard the author had been in the medical field at one point, so that tracks), all make this book a fun and punchy read. Turns out I have a new favourite subgenre - "medical fantasy", as the author calls it.