I was shelving in the children’s section at work and I opened this and read the whole thing in about five minutes. Yay.

Strong sequel. Great dragons. Interesting worldbuilding. Interesting approach to gendered language. Definitely a contender for best gay dragon book IF you do not read Tess of the Road ever because that book has a considerably worse approach to gender in the same universe.

I FINALLY finished this book about eight months after starting it. Switching to audiobook definitely helped.

Armistice was a weaker book than Amberlough, partly because it’s the middle book in a trilogy, partly because the character dynamics are just less compelling, and partly because of what I like to call the white author writing a non-western fantasy setting problem (I don’t think there was actually anything wrong with the way that Donnelly wrote Porachis, but it’s just very clear that she’s going out on a limb with that part of the book and the culture feels less full and detailed than Gedda did in book one).

Anyway, I still very much enjoyed this book overall. Aristide really shines here, as he should. Lillian is interesting and complicated and while I still missed [redacted] horribly, her story added a lot to this book (and arguably drove the whole plot).

Cordelia and her street slang are back in full force here, which is wonderful.

And I LOVED the early film set stuff! This series continues to do things that I don’t usually see in fantasy, and I enjoy it very much.

There There is the story of twelve indigenous people who end up at a powwow in Oakland, California. It traces their lives and their struggles and their relationships with each other in a gorgeously non-linear way.

There are so many interesting and experimental things going on in this book. There’s definitely a whole capstone paper about indigenous temporarily here. There’s a lot of interesting ruminations on Native identity and urban Native identity in particular (and I’m sure I missed a lot more as a white reader).

This is the first piece of long-form fiction that I’ve ever seen successfully incorporate first, second, AND third person point of view chapters as well as both present and past tense sections interspersed throughout the book (see earlier point about non-linear storytelling).

I read There There this week because it’s the Great Read at the library where I work and therefore kind of the book of the moment in my town. Tommy Orange is doing an author event that I tragically won’t be able to attend. It’s all very cool and I’m glad it got me to read this book!

I didn’t totally love this one, though. Some of the characters felt a bit too similar. The women in particular were all defined by sexual violence in one way or another, and while I know that it’s really important to talk about the horrible amounts of sexual violence faced by Native women, I wish that there had been more variety of women’s stories in this book. Maybe that’s unreasonable to expect from a cis man author. I don’t know.

Also, why did I think that Tommy Orange was queer? I’m pretty sure he’s not and the book is incredibly cishet, so I’m not sure where that idea came from. Oh well.

Please look at the very extensive list of content warnings if you have any of the major triggers. This book contains most of them.

ARC expired before I could finish it.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Griffin for the eARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

This book absolutely delivers on so many levels. The college friend group drama. The divorced parent shit. The found family. 

Both of the main characters are bi, as is the friend/daughter.

There’s a motorcycle.

There’s sneaking around.

And there is SO MUCH SEX. Seriously. There’s car sex, face sitting, shower sex, sexting, semi-public sex, and more, and all of the scenes are written very well. 

The age gap was handled really well. The characters had SO MUCH chemistry. Basically, I highly recommend this book.

Gorgeous worldbuilding. I just didn't care about any of it really.

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

I definitely didn’t like this book as much as everyone else seems to.

Look, I want to make it very clear that Alexis Hall succeeded in his goal to write a historical romance with a trans main character in which her trans identity is not the main source of conflict. Yay! 

Viola and Gracewood’s relationship was very sweet.

Hall handled gender and disability quite well. I have no complaints there.

Mira was by far my favorite character (loved her Frankenstein fixation!), and I would love to read a book about her finding love (especially if her love interest is not a man cause regardless of who she finds attractive, I don’t think that character would be happy married to a man within her particular social circumstances).

My main problem with this book was that it was far too long. It’s about 150 pages longer than industry standard for an adult romance novel (historical or contemporary), and it drags horribly at times. The characters also have the same conversation over and over.

The random villain in the final 1/4 of the story didn’t bother me conceptually. I thought the plot was fine. I just wish he’d been set up better and earlier. I also think there was some wasted potential for tension between Viola and Gracewood during all of that. Maybe the villain plot could have happened earlier and the official getting together could have been later (but with more tension and less repetition).

I enjoy Alexis Hall’s characters and his humor quite a bit. I just want him to write shorter books and pace them better.

This book was extremely messy, and that made it a more enjoyable read but also means that I have a multitude of issues with it.

The experience of reading this book felt the most like being 18 again of any other YA contemporary book I’ve read. I think it accomplished this by feeling like it was set firmly in the mid 2010s while being published in 2021.

Speaking of the publication year, I found the sheer number of Harry Potter references in this queer post-TERF Rowling book to be in incredibly poor taste. No one asked for this and it tells trans readers that you don’t really care about them. Yikes.

Scottie and Irene were cute, but I think I enjoyed the (mostly straight) side characters more. Annoying when that happens.

Why was everyone Catholic? Odd choice.

I really did like how flawed everyone was. Every character in this book had all sorts of Issues, and that made it feel much more real.

I hate Charlotte a lot. Glad the book does too.

This came so close to being the first piece of teen media to get college application timelines correct, but it still failed by having characters write their common app essays in like potentially early February. That’s not how anything works.

And of course the book refuses to say the word “lesbian.” Fun fun fun!