I loved the political intrigue. I loved the parts of this book that leaned more into being a character study of Baru. I liked Tain Hu and thought that she was handled very well. I just sometimes felt like there was too much emotional and narrative distance between us and Baru, and I’m also not sure how much I care about reading the sequels anytime soon.

That being said, anti-imperialist speculative fiction is my shit, especially when it’s queer, so I absolutely gobbled most of this up. 

Extremely strange encountering the word “sodomite” in a high fantasy novel, though. I will be pondering that choice for a while I think.

yesyesyes

This was so cute! If you're looking for a cozy romantasy with a diverse cast and some very good animals, this is absolutely the book for that.

Was the romance predictable? yes of course. Did I mind? Not at all.

There are some fun plot twists here that were set up well but did not feel too obvious in advance. Love that. Doesn't happen enough in any sort of media.

The side characters were delightful. I loved them all (though Lucie felt very underdeveloped to me). 

Wish there'd been more of a discussion of the international adoption part of things, but you can't have it all I suppose.

Tropes-wise, this was my favorite in the series. I love friends to lovers, and fake dating is always a good time, especially when there's a real reason for the fake dating like there is here (to the extent that it is ever actually necessary for anyone to fake a relationship, of course). I loved that Rae is a fantasy author, and I loved how much time we spend in fantasy novel world in this book, though of course none of that aspect of things is very detailed. Rae and Zach were great side characters already in the series, so seeing them shine as leads was very satisfying.

There's also a good dog and some very sensitively-written demisexual representation, which I greatly appreciated. And the sex scenes were so fun.

I wanted a little more depth to certain stuff, but that was probably inevitable considering what a short book this was.

At least no one is ex-military in this one cause geez. 

Anyway, this book was sweet. Hannah and Nathan have good chemistry. The sex is great. They navigate their complex relationship well. WOW is there a lot of jealousy and no real acknowledgment of how toxic that can get, but I tend to expect that from aggressively monogamous romance novels.

Hannah is bi. Good for her.

Shoutout to my lovely partner for lending me this one. The art is great. The main relationship is wild and fun times. Will be continuing with the series for sure!

Thank you to NetGalley for the eARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

We Set the Dark on Fire is one of my favorite sapphic YA books, and while the sequel kind of let me down, I still enjoyed it and looked forward to Tehlor Kay Mejia's future work.

Lucha of the Night Forest starts off so strong. Mejia creates a richly-imagined society run by cruel, exploitative leaders who have enabled drug abuse to overrun the community. It is a deep and thoughtful commentary on real-world issues presented with a lot of heart.

Lucha, our main character, is a teenager doing her best, trying to provide for her sister and her drug-addicted mother, making the bargains she has to make in order to survive. The opening of this book is a lush and complicated upper-YA fantasy with the promise of difficult relationships and important themes.

Lucha's deal with a devil of sorts, Salvador, and her growing attraction to a girl named Paz, as well as her relationship with her little sister Lis, promise to weave together into exactly the story I wanted this book to be.

And then our characters head into the forest, and nothing interesting happens for the rest of the book.

I wish I were exaggerating. I wish that I had cared about anything that happened in the forest or anything that came after, but I did not. There were some interesting ideas in the mix, certainly, but I kept feeling like the heart of the story had been abandoned and Lucha and co were just sort of fucking around for the rest of it. Even the final confrontation was anti-climactic because it felt like we were so disconnected from the real stakes of the world.

Anyway, I'd give most of this book a solid two stars, but the opening and its potential is so strong and so brilliant that I am giving it three. 

In many ways, this is the best book in the series. In others, it is the weakest.

R. F. Kuang's knowledge of colonial history is on full display here, as are her thoughts about colonialism, and those commentaries are a strong and often heartbreaking part of The Burning God.

I will say, however, that I wish that the world had felt larger. It's small in book one because Rin's knowledge of the world is small. It expands in book two. It fails to expand again here. I think there could have been more of a sense of the wider world (or just a sense that more than three countries had ever existed in it, honestly) without cheapening the ending. In fact, I think that the inevitable and heartbreaking ending would have felt even MORE inevitable and even MORE heartbreaking had there been other countries out there somewhere that simply would not or could not get involved in the Nikaran/Hesperian conflict.

Everything is so desperate here, and it somehow keeps getting more so. The problem is that after Golyn Niis and the end of The Poppy War, and after the utter, unending misery of so much of The Dragon Republic, neither the tone nor the content have the capacity to get much darker, and so they kind of don't.

Rin and Kitay's relationship continues to be my favorite thing, and the thing that fascinates me most. Kitay is a character who gives me so much hope, and Rin is a character who gives me so little, and I love how Kuang plays with that dynamic, especially given the nature of their relationship by this point. 

Rin and Nezha are of course compelling as well, and in many ways their conflict and their complex feelings about each other form the centerpoint of the entire series. We certainly get the most of Nezha's perspective here, but I still find their dynamic in The Dragon Republic the most compelling out of the three installments.

I think that the character work and the writing are very strong here, and I'm rating it extremely highly because it did what it set out to do and affected me deeply, but there were just a few things that did not totally work for me, and the experience of reading it was more exhausting than anything else.

I don't know why I thought that starting this right now was a good idea. My brain is mush. Will return to it at a later date.

I wish that this book had been better. I really do.

It wasn't bad. It just felt very rough around the edges and could have done with a lot more work in a lot of areas.

Shatter the Sky was hardly the best book I've ever read, but I enjoyed it so much. It played with familiar tropes in ways that I enjoyed. It was deliciously queer. I got attached to the characters.

Storm the Earth is similarly tropey. I like Maren and Sev, and they both get good arcs here. The dragon lore is great. But the whole story plays it safe in ways that frustrated me. I wanted Wells to take more risks here. I wanted the story to have room to breathe, not just in the romance aspect but in the revolution stuff as well.

A lot of basic writing stuff falls down a bit in this one. Characters who were never previously mentioned appear to help at the eleventh hour, which feels deeply unsatisfying and also hints at a whole chunk of plot that we never got. A longer book with more point of view characters actually might have been a smart move here, but that's something that Wells probably would have had to set up in book one since this was just a duology rather than a longer series.

And I'm not mad at how the romance stuff played out, but it did feel very safe. I think that if we'd gotten Kaia's perspective in this book (and maybe in the first one as well), things might have felt more satisfying. Or if

things had just ended in polyamory

, but that would have required large-scale changes to the whole book. Oh well.

Overall, I still mostly enjoyed this and would recommend the duology to fellow queer dragon book fans or just anyone looking for a YA fantasy novel with a bisexual lead. I just wish that book two had taken more risks and gotten some better editing and maybe been paced a bit better.

I would absolutely love to revisit this world if the author is interested in doing that cause I think there's a lot of potential to tell interesting stories in it.