Not my favorite of the Becky Chambers books I’ve read cause I just never quite gelled with the characters as much as I wanted to, but still very good.

It was fairly obvious early on where the story was headed, but I didn’t mind that because the plot was executed really well.

Sidra was a great main character. Jane/Pepper was good as well, but I would have connected to her more if we’d gotten a bit more of the in-between years I think. 

This book expands the world and the lore and the science from book one, which I liked. I also thought this one handled gender much better.

The main themes here are definitely consciousness and purpose. Kind of feels like a precursor to the Monk and Robot series in some ways. I’ll definitely be thinking about it for a while.

Excited to continue with the other books in the series!

However this book has been marketed to you, a lot of information was probably missing.

The Bone Shard Daughter is the story of the emperor’s daughter, Lin, and bone shard magic, yes. It’s also the story of a smuggler named Jovis, his tortured past, and his very wonderful animal companion, Mephi. It’s the story of a sapphic couple, Phalue and Ranami, and of rebellion and social change on their island (Phalue and Ranami are not super central to the plot, but they do have the only real romantic subplot in the book, and I liked them very much). And it’s the story of a woman named Sand who lives on an island with a group of people who have no memories of their lives before the island.

Lin and Jovis are basically dual protagonists with point of view chapters written in first person, while the other three are important supporting characters with point of view chapters written in third person. This was super cool in the audiobook because there were three different narrators.

The pacing was really slow at times, and the plot took till about the halfway point to really get going, but that actually made me more excited to read the rest of the series. Book two in a fantasy series is often the least plot-heavy and the most burdened by filler, and I feel like that isn’t going to happen as much here.

The primary magic system in this book is super spooky and kind of terrifying to the point where I would definitely recommend it to horror fans looking to get into fantasy. I’m also excited to see the additional magical concepts explored more in the sequels.

Mephi was definitely a highlight and should be a main selling point for the book. Who doesn’t like a talking magical animal companion? Seriously!

Hard to talk more about this book without major spoilers, but I definitely recommend it despite the sometimes weird pacing and incomplete marketing, and I can’t wait to read the sequels!

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

I really liked Malice when I read it last year, and I wasn’t sure the sequel was going to hold up. To my pleasant surprise, I liked Misrule even more.

It’s been one hundred years since Aurora fell into an enchanted sleep and Alyce burned most of the kingdom of Briar to the ground. All but one of the side characters are dead. Alyce, now going by the name Nimara, rules over the Dark Court, a place of refuge for all the creatures who are welcome neither are the fae courts nor in the human realms.

Misrule is a very different beast from Malice. This is a book about morality, about moral greyness, about collective memory and trauma, about personal and cultural growth, and about the very concepts of good and evil. Everyone in this book does awful things, and no one in it feels fully irredeemable. Needless to say, I was impressed.

There were a lot of plot twists that I didn’t see coming and that were executed very well. The character of Derek in particular was utilized in some very interesting ways. I won’t say more than that because I want readers to be able to go on that journey themselves.

And of course, the sapphic element of this book is fantastic. The romance is much less important here than it was in book one, but I loved the way that Heather Walter explored Alyce/Nimara and Aurora’s relationship. If you’re okay with fictional relationships being angsty and a little fucked up, I think you’ll enjoy this one.

The beginning of the book was slow and very confusing, mostly because nothing was the same from book one, but once the plot got going, I read through to the end in two days.

I do have one major issue with this book, and it’s more of an issue because it seems to be a pattern in Heather Walter’s work: the only important character who is firmly stated to be a dark-skinned person of color dies in service of the nonhuman but white-coded main character’s growth. This happened in Malice as well, and there simply is no excuse for this in 2021/2022. 

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

Moldy Strawberries is a collection of short stories originally written in Portuguese and recently translated into English. The stories are pretty much all queer in some way. Some are written in first person, some in third. They tend to deal a lot with drug and alcohol consumption, ennui, relationships that are going nowhere, and relationships that are just starting. There's a fascinating combination of excess and lethargy in a lot of them. Quite a bit of sexual content as well, so be aware of that if you plan to read this book.

Did I like this book? Not sure. I enjoyed a couple of the stories. Would I recommend it? Potentially, to the right person, but not necessarily to the general public.

I really wanted to like this book, but it was just sort of fine. It wasn’t a great heist book cause the heists were barely described and felt under-researched when they were. It wasn’t a great character study cause none of the characters were explored in much depth. The author was getting at some really interesting and good stuff about Chinese American identity and art repatriation, but the whole thing ultimately fell short for me because the actual plot and characters felt so surface-level.

Lily was kind of a nothing character. We kept being told that she and Will had so much in common, but the narrative never really showed us that. She had more chemistry with basically everyone else than she did with Will. Their relationship felt very forced.

Alex and Irene’s romance was much better. It was a really small part of the story, but I felt it was developed well and it made sense for both characters. 

Daniel’s complicated relationship with his father was by far the best part of the book for me. I related to Daniel a lot, much more than I ever expected to, and he felt like the most complex character with the most developed relationships—funny, that, because I often felt like the narrative cared about him the least. 

Hated Daniel’s crush on Irene. I also think it would have been much more compelling for him to have had a gay crush on straight Will than a straight crush on gay Irene (not that either Irene or Alex actually identified as anything).

I thought that the prose was very lyrical and poetic, but it didn’t quite work for a book that was marketed so heavily as a heist story and that centered so much around the (underwritten) heists. I would definitely read another book by this author cause I think she has a ton of potential and a lot to say, but this one just didn’t quite work for me.

One more thing: the mentions of COVID-19 and BLM felt super weird and out of place, especially considering there were no Black characters in the book and no mentions of the pandemic having any lasting presence or impact despite the book seemingly being set in 2021. Super weird.

I did really enjoy the final heist/etc., though.

Another solid novel in the avatar universe! I definitely liked The Rise of Kyoshi more than this one. The pacing here was kind of off. The Fire Nation plot didn’t fully work for me. I wanted to spend more time on basically every aspect of the story. And yet I still really really enjoyed it. I love Kyoshi. I love Rangi. I really like the side characters. The expansions to bending lore were excellent, as were the exploration of the role of the avatar and Kyoshi’s interactions with Kuruk and Yangchen. Even though this book didn’t grab me as much as the previous one, I still think both are very much worth reading. Plus they’re sapphic!

Absolutely beautiful little book. Calming, philosophical, hopeful, sweet. I enjoyed The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet a lot, but I think it dragged a bit near the end, and I found its approach to gender kind of limited. This book did not have that problem. The pacing is perfect. Everyone is queer. There’s a lovely conversation just before the mid-point of the book where the two main characters establish that neither of them has a gender (this is because one is a robot and one is a nonbinary human, which nicely sidesteps the usual issue with only nonhuman characters having genders outside the binary). 

There’s so much about life and nature and conservation and technology packed into this very short book. I am very impressed by Becky Chambers and her ability to discuss important and often depressing issues in such a light and optimistic way.

If you want plot or action of any kind, look elsewhere. This book is slow and contemplative and only about three things happen in it. And I loved it. Very excited for book two to read more about Dex and Mosscap and the meaning of life.

Cute, sapphic, handled the age gap and power dynamic really well. Didn’t blow me away but definitely delivered on the slowburn and friends-to-lovers/coworkers-to-lovers fronts. Jo and Emma were both good and interesting characters, and I definitely rooted for their romance. Excited for the author’s next book, which I have gathered is going to be very opposite from this one in a lot of ways!

Truly a masterpiece of high fantasy.

I loved the way this book talked about religion and mythology and the way that different cultures respond to and interpret the same historical event.

I have rarely read medieval fantasy that was so clearly informed by the actual political and religious atmosphere of the Middle Ages. I loved how intentional the setting was. I also loved how rich and varied and complex the whole world felt. And how deeply linked all of the different religions and magic systems were! And how important dragons were to all of it!

I expected to love Ead and Tané, and I did, I wasn’t expecting Loth, but he ended up being my favorite. What a lovely man.

The dragons were of course excellent. The queer aspects were also excellent. I love this book and could talk about it for hours. I recommend it all the time at work (I work at a bookstore), and my friends are probably sick of hearing about it by now.

Is The Priory of the Orange Tree super long? Yes. It’s also a standalone (upcoming prequel notwithstanding) and written in a more accessible way than the vast majority of adult high fantasy. I wouldn’t recommend it as an introduction to the genre necessarily, but I also found it quite an easy and enjoyable read, so definitely don’t let the length deter you from reading it!

Be warned that there is a LOT of decapitation in this book. Maybe the author went through an Anne Boleyn phase.

I do wish there’d been a bit less Niclays and a bit more Tané because I found Niclays annoying, but otherwise I wouldn’t change much about this book.

Was the pseudo-incest situation that’s only mentioned once really necessary, though? Cause I hated that.

Almost marked this as read just to said I’d done it, but I didn’t want to lie. I tried to read this cause I’m genuinely interested in 18th century European philosophy (mostly for fantasy novel research purposes), but this book is just every bad thing that could happen to anyone ever happening to the same people One after the other. Maybe I’ll come back to it later.