In REALM OF ASH, Arwa is steeped in grief and blood, haunted by a massacre and isolated by her widowhood. The Empire which shaped her is crumbling, but she tries to be useful once more by walking in death and memory. She reckons with the weight of generations of grief and trauma, the legacy of a slow genocide caused by the Ambhan Empire forcing generations of Amrithi to choose between death and slavery over and over. 

Where EMPIRE OF SAND had a quality to the worldbuilding where it felt like it was being illuminated around the main character as she walked through the world, REALM OF ASH has an actual magical/spiritual which is actually created or revealed as Arwa and Zahir move through it. It also maintains this style in a more mundane way, through Arwa's sheltered upbringing and restrictive marriage, followed by the cloistered nature of Ambhan widowhood, setting her up for learning the nature of many things for the very first time within the story. She's naïve in some things but quick to learn, and the combination of newness and grief drive her attempts to help Zahir with his work. I loved their dynamic, the way they shift from total strangers to depending on and supporting each other in uniquely trying circumstances. 

This wraps up a very specific question left hanging from the first book: that of Arwa's fate. The main storyline starts here and wasn't present in EMPIRE OF SAND, the main character is Arwa this time, and her voice is very different from Mehr's. A lot of very major things are introduced and resolved here, it functions almost as a stand-alone book except that it is dealing with the fallout of events from EMPIRE OF SAND. Someone could pick it up and understand 95% of what's happening even if they hadn't read EMPIRE OF SAND. What gives it that stand-alone feeling is that, because Arwa doesn't actually know what happened in EMPIRE OF SAND, except for what is known publicly in the empire, her point of view doesn't require the reader to know much from that book in order to keep up with the main plot of this one. This answers what happens next and how the empire is dealing with the far-reaching consequences of the first book's conclusion. REALM OF ASH feels very complete, taking the time at the end to answer a little of where Mehr ended up, making the duology feel whole, with neither book subordinate to the other. 

I adore this book, I like it even better than EMPIRE OF SAND, something I didn't think was possible. There's no more in this series, but I plan on checking out other books by this author.

THE UNBROKEN is a tale of colonialization, uprising, and a stolen child returning to her homeland as a conscripted soldier ordered to bring it to heel. Touraine is one of the Sands, the term for Qazāli people stolen as children and raised to be soldiers by the Balladaire. This puts her in the position of being used to enforce restrictions on the people she came from. Events early in the book remove her from the Sands, the people she's lived with, fought alongside, and bled with all her life to instead be in service to princess Luca. The rest of the book explores Touraine's confused attempts to figure out what she wants and what she's willing to die for, as well as Luca's desperate attempts to hold on to power through the slim thread of her uncle's distant regard and her subordinates' loyalty. One of the strengths of THE UNBROKEN is it highlights the way that someone who is marginalized in their own group but has power and privilege over another group often uses that relative power to gain a sense of control by oppressing someone else. Luca's physical disability and precarious political position lead her to make harsher choices in order to not appear weak, something that would probably be less on her mind if she weren't constantly worried about people mistaking her physical impairment for lack of will. 

The tension between Luca and Touraine is very well handled, as throughout the story their dynamic as a pair constantly shifts, but they're never quite on the same page about the nature of their relationship. It showed over and over how no matter how attracted they might be to each other, the gulf of power between Luca's position and Touraine's means that it's impossible to trust any "Yes" from Touraine when Luca can have her tortured or killed for a "No". This affects everything from their mutual attraction to the treatment of the Sands to the handling of the rebels. 

I love the portrayal of the Qazāli rebels, I can't discuss much there without spoilers but they were dynamic as a group and as individuals, each with their own reactions to Touraine and Luca's various intrusions on their lives, as well as the reality of life under Balladaire's oppressive colonial rule. 

I'm looking forward to the sequel, I'm a little worried that it'll only get worse for the characters from here but I want to know what happens next.

I've previously loved some of this author's other books but just didn't get pulled into this one. It starts out with a lot of the tension centering around interpersonal dynamics of Lily's friend group, and I got as far as the beginning of the deportation plotline, but it's about 50/50 whether I'll like a non-thriller YA book with no magic, and this falls in the "no" pile for me. If you like sapphic historical YA about older teens finding love, give this a try.

This is a retelling of THE GREAT GATSBY so good that it made me finally get what literally happened at the end of THE GREAT GATSBY, which was a mystery large enough to vaguely bother me since high school, but so far not quite frustrating enough for me to circle back and fill my knowledge gap. THE CHOSEN AND THE BEAUTIFUL reframes Daisy's friend Jordan Baker as a queer Asian adoptee with a talent for magic and an uneasy position at the upper strata of a society which is intrigued by her right until it casts her aside. 

Based on my hazy recollection of the original, this is a beat-for-beat retelling. Because Nick (the original point of view character) and Jordan spend significant stretches of time in separate places, this book takes advantage of that time to focus in on Daisy as she's seen by Jordan away from Gatsby, and to make explicit a great many things which were just heavily implied before. If you've never read The Great Gatsby, don't worry about it, you don't need that book in order to understand this one. 

I love the use of magic, everything from the paper creations to treating demoniac as one more opportunity for vice in the midst of Prohibition. The characters are vibrant, and the way Jordan's position as simultaneous insider (affluent, friends with Daisy) and outsider (queer, Asian, adopted) sets her up to poke at the strangeness of some moments and ride with the feeling of others. Part of what this makes explicit is just how much sex was happening in and around Gatsby's parties. It starts out heavily implied, almost coy as Jordan refers to sleeping at different women's houses but not saying exactly what she did there, but gradually it becomes more and more clear. I love this portrayal of a young bi (or possibly pan) woman who knows what she wants and feels free to explore. She gets a chance to meet other Asian people and start to explore a side of herself which she lost easy access to as an adoptee. This gives her room for a storyline separate from the sensual but volatile combination of herself, Nick, Gatsby, and Daisy, and it works really well. It plays with expectation, illusion, disappointment, and surprise in a way that supports the main story but explores a part of her that their society only mentions to say they (most often Tom) didn't mean for that microaggression to catch her. 

This is an excellent retelling which doesn't need the original in order to be understood. It uses the original's themes of excess, alienation, the desperate need to be loved, and the loneliness of a crowd, then combines them with marginalizations of queerness and race to give them a poignancy and context that leaps off the page.

This is the story of the origins of Psi Corps and the accompanying waves of genocide against telepaths over a span of around a hundred years. It's great as backstory for telepaths in general and the tangled family history of several telepaths who play major roles in the TV series. As a Babylon 5 fan I loved it!

I loved this while I was reading it, and now that I've put it down I'm torn between wanting the sequel, and not trusting that the sequel will be satisfying given how this book ended and some other issues which I'll discuss. Firstly, what this book is: THE MIDNIGHT LIE is a sapphic story of moments of happiness amid oppression and abuse in a fantasy setting. It's about loving small joys and good things for their transience, not in spite of it. It's a heartbreakingly relatable portrayal of trauma bonding, abuse, and betrayal, piling small cruelties atop systemic injustices in a setting where escape isn't enough. 

One thing this does very well is show what gaslighting can look like in a way that gently and persistently provides a series of outside voices to counter the narrative being fed to the main character by her abuser. Her protests of this person's goodness and faithfulness become smaller and smaller until she finally has to decide what to do with the information she has been given. It begins subtly and slowly builds in a way that makes it a useful example of how insidious the abuse is and how much her abuser is controlling her understanding of reality, beginning when she was a much younger kid. As much as it muddles the message a little, I'm glad that the people trying to point out the one person's abuse aren't paragons themselves, that's especially important because it stop the main character from just switching which character has her undying loyalty. 

I like how queer this is but please don't pitch it to anyone as a sapphic romance. It's sapphic, there is a romance, but the combination of traits implied by that conjoined phrase is not representative of this book. So much of the emotional core in THE MIDNIGHT LIE revolves around whether and how to trust untrustworthy people, whether they can't be trusted because they're personally cruel, they're not powerful enough to provide protection from the system, or they're impermanent and nothing and no one lasts forever. This commentary on untrustworthiness and betrayal makes for a fascinating book but an emotionally fraught romance. I'm also concerned about possible biphobia transphobia from some interactions with the love interest. The words the love interest chooses when expressing jealousy are suspiciously similar to some biphobic and transphobic talking points and it was uncomfortable to read, waiting to figure out whether the character was bigoted or just insecure and using bigoted language to convey those feelings. I think it's more the second one, but I remain unsure. 

The end-of-book revelations about the truth of the setting worked well and made things make sense but I hate the decision that the main character made with that information. I don't know what she should have done instead given what she learned, but I hope the sequel takes the consequences of her choice seriously and doesn't treat it flippantly. I want it fixed but I don't want it cheapened by being handled too quickly.

CHAINBREAKER by Tara Sim is a historical sci-fi/fantasy story about gay boys in love across what feels like an impossible distance. It features clocktower terrorists, the complexity of colonial rebellion, and what Danny believes are too many zeppelins.

I love this book, I loved every minute of reading it, and I'm just so happy about it. I love the way Danny and Colton's relationship has changed subtly and feels more established than when they first got together. Because of plot reasons they don't actually spend much time in scenes together, but this means we get to see Colton on his own, as his own person, which I love. I'd guessed the general shape of his origins and I was right in a manner more horrifying than what I'd vaguely anticipated, the reveal scene is well-written and emotionally devastating in all the best ways. I like Daphne much better here now that she's one of the main narrators, and I appreciate that her heritage is relevant without tokenizing her. The antagonists are genuinely scary, and the mystery of what's going on with the attacks and bombings is very compelling. The reveals in the last few chapters were shocking in a satisfying way, they were consistent with the narrative while also being a surprise during this first reading. 

I liked India as a setting and I liked how there are several named Indian characters who are featured and important to the plot. Because a large part of the story revolves around a fictional version of Indian rebellion under British rule and occupation, the variety of Indian perspectives helped keep any one character from appearing to speak for the whole country, especially when part of the point is that it's complicated and there's no one clear answer but the characters have to decide how they will live and act anyway. 

This doesn't really wrap up anything left hanging from the first book, but that's more a feature of how self-contained the main plot of the first book is, it didn't leave much hanging. It continues some interpersonal relationships that were established there, but it doesn't close out anything I can think of, exactly. The main storyline starts here and wasn't present in the first book, and some of what it introduces is resolved, but this kind of feels like book one could have stood alone, and then this is the first half of something that will be resolved in the final book of the trilogy. That's a really common (and generally good) structure for trilogies, and it works really well for this series. There's a lot of stuff for the third book to pick up and address (like the cliffhanger ending!), so I'm very eager to read that conclusion. Danny returns as a narrator, and some more minor characters from the first book get to narrate their own experiences here. Their voices are distinct and tend to match their portrayals from the first book really well. This might make sense if someone picked it up at random and didn't know about the series as a whole, especially since a lot of the world-building is devoted to showing India and their version of the clocktowers.

I feel strange saying this, but I'm impressed with how the homophobia was handled. It was established in TIMEKEEPER that Danny is gay, and there's a pretty clear implication that it's discouraged or possibly actively despised in England, but it kind of takes a backseat to the "greater issue" that his lover is a clocktower spirit (who aren't supposed to exist). CHAINBREAKER, the homophobia intersects with racism in what I understand to be an historically accurate way, but its depiction on the page is as minimal as possible while still clearly conveying what's going on. It revolves around characters dealing with the potentiality of homophobia and racism, and shows how that affects their lives, but doesn't give much focus to the characters who have been established as bigoted, since the main characters do their best to avoid them. That said, homophobia, various forms of bigotry, and othering of a main character are major themes in this series, so check out the CWs if you're not sure whether you want that right now.

This is great and I'm looking forward to FIRESTARTER!

EMPIRE OF SAND is a transformative story of vows, agency, and choice, a slow-burn romance between two people who didn't get the chance to freely say yes, and the cruel power of a man bending even gods' dreams to his will. 

The main character (Mehr) is biracial in a fantasy setting, and part of the story is how this combination of identities is distinct from being merely half of one identity and half the other, but is also/instead its own thing. Her father is from the main ethnic group in the ever-expanding empire which is slowly devouring the desert while exploiting the gods' dreams, her mother is from a nomadic people who are used for the magic in their blood. Often the characters who seek to use her are trying to exploit one part of her heritage rather than treating her as a unified whole, and her narration shifts in how she describes herself throughout the text as her relationship with and self-conception of her identity changes. 

The world building is really good, it focuses on the people in a way that highlights the space, and whole effect comes off wonderfully. Information about the setting comes up as it matters to Mehr and the people around her, like walking through a space slowly which is being illuminated as it's described by someone who cares deeply about it. 

The villain is genuinely chilling, taking advantage of how easy it is for powerful abusers to control how much of their cruelty is on display to any one person. There's a sense of helplessness (frequently explicit) that Mehr is surrounded by people who wouldn't believe her if she truthfully claimed that the marks on her skin were caused by the Maha, it's made worse when some of the women at the temple keep trying to save her... from the husband she didn't choose but is slowly getting to know. They can clearly see that she's being abused, but because of how totally the Maha has enthralled them they wouldn't believe the truth. Mehr has a lot of compassion for the servants and mystics around her, referring repeatedly to the way that it makes sense that they would love so completely this person, the Maha, who has done nothing but hurt Mehr. The slow pacing helps convey the tension and uncertainty of living around someone who has been unspeakably cruel and might be so again, sometime, but not necessarily right now. 

One of the strongest messages around choice in this book is that finally getting to choose doesn't have to mean avoiding something you were previously forced to do. If it did, then it wouldn't really be free, because then every action would still be dictated by that prior lack of agency. I love the slow burn romance, every quiet moment and intimacy has so much feeling behind it, they care so much about consent even though their abuser is contriving to remove all their choices, it's just done so well. 

I'm definitely reading the sequel, I want to see what they'll choose to do next!

THE BONE WAY is a sapphic Orpheus and Eurydice retelling exploring illness, grief, sacrifice, and love as Teagan enters the kingdom of the dead after her wife Cress went alone to beg for a cure.

I love the flashbacks interspersed between sections of the present timeline, they gave welcome context and helped even out the pacing. The descriptions are vibrant, and the cast of characters is suitably small for a novella. My favorite detail is the backstory for the queen, it has messy complexities and leaves those jagged edges unresolved. This would make sense even if you haven't encountered this myth previously. As a retelling this obviously draws inspiration from the myth but doesn't refer back to it explicitly. 

I liked this and I'm glad I read it! 

Tried to get out of my comfort zone a bit and this was too far. No issue with the book itself, it’s just not what I’m looking for.