God, what a silly book.

There are elements here of what makes later Discworld books great. The humor is of course foremost among them. The stuff with DEATH is great. The Luggage is entertaining. 

Rincewind doesn’t fully work for me in this first installment.

Also, it’s SUCH a parody that a lot of the plot just feels very tired.

The opening in Ankh Morpork is fantastic and so entertaining. The ending is lovely and philosophical and absurd in equal measure. The middle chunks are kind of whatever.

Favorite quotes:

Talia Hibbert continues to be the only valid writer of cishet contemporary romance. I honestly have no idea how she does it. Her books are full of things that I would not normally enjoy. In this case, there's the massive, super muscular man and the tiny, delicate woman he's obsessed with. Usually I find the genre's obsession with that dynamic to be super weird, but it was actually okay here.

I would call Evan a himbo, but he's not dumb. He's just big and strong and really, really gentlemanly. Ruth is a lovely main character with heartbreaking trauma. Her autism is written with a lot of sensitivity. Her relationship with her sister was super compelling. 

But why did Evan have to be ex-military? And so proud of it too. Oh well.

Anyway, fuck Daniel Burne, and I WILL be continuing with the series.

Loved most of this book. Unsure how to feel about some of it. Might read it again at some point.

Definitely one of the most creative utopias I've encountered. Mixed feelings about some of the conclusions the book seems to reach. Thoroughly enjoyed the story and the way it explored a lot of issues and ideas.

This book was very fun. I enjoyed it a lot. Very steamy, but somehow all of the smut was very vague? Healthy communication, kinda sketchy bondage practices. Good characters that weren't very developed cause the plot just jumped right into the relationships without establishing much of anything in the way of background. Triads aren't really my thing, but this one worked well. And it was lovely to see these three trans artists finding community and pleasure with each other. I'll definitely be checking out some of E. E. Ottoman's other works.

I will likely come back to this at some point out of some twisted sense of obligation, but my book club decided to go with something else and I have no desire to finish this book at this time.

No rating because I don't think any number would really make sense for this book.

In Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe has created a heartfelt, introspective, beautifully-illustrated memoir about eir journey with gender (and sexuality, to a lesser extent). It is deeply personal book, and it is of course also the most banned book in the country right now for the usual bigoted reasons.

I related deeply to a lot of Kobabe's experiences, from going to Waldorf school (and having Waldorf teacher parents) to some of the fandom and gender stuff.

The rest of eir experiences felt familiar to me simply because I have been a queer person on the internet for the last decade, and unfortunately, that knowledge of things like the One Direction fandom ran directly counter to my enjoyment of the book and my respect for the author as a person.

Don't get me wrong, I respect Maia Kobabe a lot as a storyteller and artist. I appreciate how absolutely fucking raw and honest this book is. I also don't think I would like em very much if we met in literally any context, and I spent a lot of the book judging em. Real person fanfiction? Wincest? REALLY? We're just admitting to fetishization with absolutely zero acknowledgment that that's what it is in our PUBLISHED MEMOIRS? Wild.

Anyway, that panel of Alanna was absolutely perfect and made me feel a lot of kinship with someone I will likely never meet, even if I did end up judging a lot of that person's choices in what to discuss in eir book.

Disclaimer about how I read this book:
I bought the original self-published version back in 2021 and have a copy of that edition on my bookshelf. However, I ended up getting the traditionally published version as an ebook through the library, so all of my critiques are on the most polished version of the story, not the anonymous 2021 version.

I have a LOT of very lovely friends and mutuals who LOVE this book and for whom it means a lot. I am so happy that all of you have this book and that it gave you so much of value. I am also not going to hold back on any of my critiques simply because people I like and respect are going to disagree with them.

A Broken Blade by Melissa Blair is a quick, easy read. I breezed through it in a couple of days during my less-busy moments at work.

I've followed Blair on TikTok for several years, and I appreciate a lot of what she was trying to do with this book. In particular, she aimed to breathe diversity and an indigenous perspective into the very white-dominated (and frequently very racist) fantasy romance genre. I think she mostly succeeded in that goal.

I enjoyed some of the dialogue, and several characters had interesting moments. Killian was probably the most compelling character for me, but I also look forward to seeing more of Syrra and several others.

Blair's creation of the Shades was clearly inspired by a deeply personal knowledge of colonization and the horrors it inflicts on indigenous women in particular, and I look forward to a deeper exploration of their situation in the sequel.

The book is fast-paced, and the mystery is structured very competently, if also very obviously.

My first, and possibly biggest, issue with this book is the lack of depth to the world. I think that good fantasy writers ground their worlds in inspirations drawn from real-world cultures and real-world history. And this book has the IDEA of that inspiration, but it's not grounded in anything.

Basically, the entire aesthetic of this book is a renaissance faire. People wear corsets and cloaks and have leg slits in their dresses. I have no sense of the geography of this world beyond what is given in the map at the front. I have no sense of the agriculture or trade or economic system. I have no visuals of anything other than clothing, weapons, and some of the characters' faces. And I don't think that authors have to give us all of that, but it's very jarring to get these very in-depth descriptions of Keera's outfits and then have very little sense of the world at large.

"What if a basic fantasy world with a ren faire aesthetic was an evil colonialist power that enslaves and commits genocide against its magical creatures and we actually confronted that?" is a VERY compelling question to ask and a very compelling setup for a book. I just don't feel like A Broken Blade explores that question below the surface, and that's a problem that starts with the worldbuilding and continues through every single other aspect of the book.

I've heard many people point to Keera's character as a highlight of the book, and while I understand why other readers would like or relate to her, she simply did not work for me as a character. I did not feel like her alcoholism was handled very well. The balance of showing and telling was totally off (as with a lot of things in this book, honestly), and I felt like "oh yeah she takes this magical drug and it gets rid of her alcoholism and then her body looks better" was very much a cop-out of what could have been a fascinating and harrowing character arc about her struggles with addiction.

I honestly think Keera might have worked better as a third-person point-of-view character than she does as a first-person narrator. Her motivations all come to us in dialogue or in flashbacks, and a lot of her choices felt hollow to me because of that. Part of my frustration might be that I read this book shortly after The Unbroken by C. L. Clark, which features a main character who heartbreakingly deconstructs the colonialism that has shaped her upbringing and then does some really powerful things afterward, and maybe I was unfairly hoping for a similar arc for Keera, but regardless, Keera's choices and motivations fell flat.

And that is SO FRUSTRATING to me because, like I said earlier, the Shades are SO CONCEPTUALLY COMPELLING, and there is so much potential to explore so many issues there, both through metaphor and through the implications that Melissa Blair has created in her own world. If only Keera ACTUALLY cared about the other Shades the way she claims to. If only the narrative afforded them the agency to make their own decisions or question their situation.

I truly felt like Keera cared more about NIkolai, someone she barely knows, than she does about the Shades, her own people. Yes, she SAYS that everything she does is for the Shades, but her actions say the opposite. 

My other big issue with this book is that it feels like it was constructed around popular tropes in order to have a marketable story—and that's because it was. It was written using tropes that BookTok loves so that BookTok would read it. And that's fine. But I can tell when I'm reading it that despite the author's passion about colonization and indigenous issues, this book was written less out of a desire to explore those themes in a fantasy setting (though that desire was certainly present) and more out of a desire to write something that would sell. That is a totally understandable motivation. We all have it, as writers. It just makes for a less compelling story with less substance to it.

Another issue I had with this book is that the way it talks about gender is very shallow. I think there's some sort of attempt at a critique of cisnormativity, but it's happening through the lens of fantasy metaphors, and it doesn't really work. Hopefully the sequel will either do a better job of exploring that issue or will ignore it completely.

Keera is bisexual and has a past relationship with a woman

(though I hate that said queer woman was essentially fridged to further Keera's character development, and I would have been a lot less frustrated with that choice if there had been another sapphic couple on-page)

, and people who apparently read certain parts of the text more closely than I did assure me that several other characters (most of the main cast, in fact) are stated to be queer in some way as well (I somehow missed most of this, but I do trust my sources very much on this one). So it is a queer book. And the main romance is fun. I didn't care about it much because again, it felt like it was constructed more around the tropes than it was around what made sense for the characters, but I understand why other readers would like it, and I do look forward to seeing where it goes in the sequel.

A few weeks ago, I sent a pretty rough draft of the first couple chapters of a fantasy novel to beta readers, and a lot of the feedback I've gotten back is about the overall indistinctness of the world in those opening chapters. People aren't sure what's going on or what anything looks like. There's nothing tethering them to the world. There's nothing making them care. There are seeds of compelling ideas and maybe even compelling characters, but the thing itself is not yet compelling, or in fact very good.

This sort of feedback is not fun to get from people you like and respect. It hurts. Of course it does. Because in your mind, as the writer, as the creator of this world, the visuals sparkle. The ideas are THERE. The characters are fleshed out to perfection. But that's all in my head, and that's why I have those beta readers—to tell me what gaps they’re seeing, so that I can work on actually executing those ideas I have.

A Broken Blade reads like that first draft I sent out. The seeds of something compelling. Some moments that are genuinely interesting or good or fun. But it reads as though it never got serious content editing. Like the author didn't have someone look at it in the early stages and say, "I can't really visualize what this world looks like beyond some clear ren faire inspirations, and I feel like you're really interested in exploring these specific themes, but they’re not coming through in a very clear way."

And that's why I'm actually excited to read the sequel. Because maybe with more editing, not just of the text but of the CONTENT and the IDEAS and the WORLDBUILDING, this has the potential to be a story that I really enjoy and become really invested in. The execution just really was not there in this one.  

This book is utterly brilliant. It's one of the best things I've read so far this year. It reignited my love for high fantasy. And it's the author's DEBUT?! Phenomenal.

The Unbroken is a military fantasy set in a fantasy version of North Africa (the former Shālan Empire) that has been colonized by fantasy France (Balladaire). It follows two point-of-view characters: Touraine, a Qazāli-born conscript of the imperial army, and Luca, the crown princess of Balladaire, and their complicated relationship with each other, both as individuals and as stand-ins and representatives for their nations and cultures.

I haven't read another fantasy novel that explores internalized oppression, empire, and white saviorism in quite the gorgeous and intertwined way that C. L. Clark does in The Unbroken.

When we first meet Luca, she is a princess and a scholar, passionate about doing right by her people—so that she can take the throne that is rightfully hers from her uncle the Duke Regent. As a scholar, she has theoretical knowledge of the horrors of empire. She expresses interest in and respect for Shālan culture in a way that no other Balladairan-born character does. These aspects of Luca endear her to the reader—and draw Touraine to her as the two women grow closer. And then she loses herself to the same colonizing impulses that she thought herself better than earlier in the novel. 

When we first meet Touraine, all she cares about is the wellbeing of her fellow conscripts. They are her family, and she will do whatever necessary—even on behalf of the empire that took everything from them—to protect that family and do what she thinks is best for them. Unlike Luca, Touraine is fully grounded in the realities of her situation—and then her world shifts and expands. She makes mistakes. She fucks things up. And she is complex and heartbreaking and BRILLIANT. Touraine's growth over the course of this book stunned me. It made me feel so many things so deeply. Her entire mindset changes, gradually and painfully, over the course of the novel, without changing what makes up her essential self. 

The worldbuilding is delicious. C. L. Clark obviously draws all of the aesthetics and language of both Qazāl and Balladaire from the real world, but she also incorporates trade, religion, political theory, and even disease in ways that make the world feel unique and fresh and lived in. 

I don't want to talk about the plot too much because I think that readers should discover its twists on their own, but I cannot wait to discuss their book at greater length with more spoilers at some point. 

My one real critique of this book is that I didn't feel like I understood the magic well enough for the heavy lifting it does in the climax and resolution of the book to be totally satisfying.

Additionally, if you are looking for romance, this is the wrong book for you. To be clear, it is VERY sapphic. And if you enjoy hot women with swords, you are absolutely going to eat this shit up. But I would not call the extremely fraught entanglement between the two main characters romantic. It is far more complicated than that, and I feel like boiling down Touraine and Luca's dynamic to the sexual or romantic desire of it would be an insult both to Touraine's character and to the overall goals of the novel. There is not a romance between the leads in this book, nor should there be.

There IS a sapphic side couple in this book that will likely break your heart, though.

Oh, and HOLY MOMMY ISSUES OH MY GOD.

Favorite quotes:

It likely goes without saying that this book handles its diversity brilliantly. The world is queernormative and seemingly lacking in any sort of gender roles, but it has all of the other violences and bigotries and evils of our own world. Luca is physically disabled, and the book handles her disability beautifully. 

C. L. Clark is the sort of writer I want to be. I can't wait to read The Faithless.

This is a good anthology. I learned things. I felt things. Some of the stories didn't quite work for me, but that's somewhat inevitable.

My favorites were "History of the New World" by Adam Garnet Jones (WOW) and "Seed Children" by Mari Kurisato. I highly recommend this anthology just for those two stories and what they have to say about settler-colonialism, technology, family, and indigenous futurism.

I can only leave a library book on my "currently reading" for so many months before I need to accept that I'm not going to read it right now and just return it.