I think what turned me off of this book is I was initially very stoked for Vivian's covert exit from her life, the intrigue of managing anonymity after being so famous. Emotionally I was all set for something that felt like a heist and then the book abruptly transforms into something else. I was fully absorbed into the first set of rules and then just couldn't make the pivot into the galaxy-hopping ragtag band story. 

THE DREAM THIEVES delves into Ronan's nightmares as the raven boys (and Blue) adjust to the changes in Cabeswater after their previous adventures. Secrets can kill. Some already have.

The characters are broken and messy, trying to help each other in their various pursuits but not always getting it right. I like the shift in focus from the first book. I especially like getting a lot more of Ronan, in a lot of important ways this is his book just like THE RAVEN BOYS was Gansey’s book. 

One thing this series does very well and this book continues is portraying antagonists in a way that makes them at the very least understandable, if not outright sympathetic. I came away with a much more nuanced dislike of a particular villain, and I’m really liking a different one who thus far seems to be pulling off a heel-face turn. 

The world-building is a bit lopsided, it's very focused on the characters and the way that the magic affects them but it leaves even more unexplained. It makes up for it by delving into their inner lives in a very intimate way, exploring the nuances of them as people both individually and with each other. It takes seriously the idea that people are a bit different around various combinations of other people, and uses that to heighten and dissipate tension throughout the story. The Raven Boys are the Raven Boys, Blue is Blue, while everything and everyone else matter only as much as they intersects with their lives. No more, and no less. It has a feeling of extreme focus, like nothing else in the world matters to them and their story, with all its complications and obsessions, is all there is.

This wraps up a very major thing left hanging from the first book. Its main storyline was teased earlier but a secondary plot begins here and wasn't present previously. Several major things are introduced and resolved in this book. It left some things hanging to be resolved later. There's a mix of returning and new narrators, and their voices are very distinct from each other and from different narrators in the first book. Some of the plot would make sense without having read the first book, but as a whole this definitely needs the first book and couldn't stand alone if someone read it at random. 

I have a couple quibbles related to characterization, but given that the overall arc of this series is that people start out mixed up and confused and bumping against each other‘s hurt edges and then gradually try to get better, it makes it hard to know whether a couple of my sticking points are on purpose or if they are artifacts of unintentional bigotry. Something that was briefly in THE RAVEN BOYS but returns here is the idea that a particular character is beautiful... except for her large nose. Since the book does go out of its way to make a point of addressing stereotypes that lie adjacent to this one and calling them out as harmful, I don’t know what to think about this moment, but it made me uneasy. 

Overall I loved this as a continuation of the series but it's definitely a middle-of-the-series book (and it shows). The plot manages to be almost self-contained in its scope but utterly reliant on the first book for its foundation and backstory to sustain its emotional core. The growth and change that happens here is so wonderful because the first book had something else, something harsher, ill-fitting, and tense running through it. The release of that tension and exploration of the characters is fantastic because of how they were before, while also being utterly consistent with them as people. It's progression rather than revision, and done wonderfully.

THE RAVEN BOYS is a found family story of intense friendships, supporting each other's obsessions, and navigating the uneasy balance of helping someone but not doing the thing for them. 

I was a little nervous when the start of the book seemed headed towards "girl torn between two boys and whoever she chooses will die". Maybe in the end the series will have that technically happen, I don't know yet, but in the meantime this is a complex and earnest story of five kids on the cusp of adulthood just trying to be good friends to each other even though disparities in privilege and circumstance stain their most heartfelt interactions. This is made more complicated when (because of clairvoyant stuff) the girl knows that one of the boys will die within the year. All five of them have their own unique tangle of issues and baggage and they don't say the right thing all the time but they're just trying to get it right (some of them act like they want to crash and burn and seem to be trying to get it wrong). Blue fits in among the Raven Boys without being overshadowed, I love her relationship with her family (especially in contrast to the way the boys are so disconnected from each of theirs). Gansey has all the money he could want but he can't just solve his friends' problems for them and it's tearing him up inside. Adam is determined not to be beholden to a rescuer, but needs a way out. Noah tries to keep the peace (or at least get out of the way). Ronan is great to have on one's side in a fight but oscillates between seeming apathy and violence in the face of an uncertain future. 

The world-building is pretty decent on the magic front but definitely assumes that you know things like what a boys school is. The characters are very well developed but the world a step away from them is sparsely sketched at best, and it's a very character-driven story. I liked how focused it felt, and it was nice to have a story about teens who attend school that wasn't desperate for me to know what happened in each one of their classes, or exactly what Adam does at his job after school. It's a particular vibe and I enjoyed how it worked out here. When it does focus in on a location it paints it in vibrant detail, I'm thinking particularly of the grove. Each space is described based on how it feels to be there and secondarily on how it appears, which suited the increasingly magical bent of the story.

I'm definitely going to read the next book, I need to see what happens next for them. 

LOST BOY is a nuanced and grief-filled portrayal of gaslighting, death, loss, and manipulation where it becomes unmistakably clear that Peter is the villain.

This shines both as a retelling and as an original story. Peter Pan is an interesting starting point for retellings because he and his story (at minimum) offer opportunities to either play up the wonder of childhood and the adventure offered by the island or to explore the darkness in having a place filled with fear and violence but little protection which generally requires magic to leave. This is unabashedly of the second ilk and there the story is the strongest. It's a book about kids slowly losing their innocence and breaking more and more until the grief and disillusion force them to literally grow up as they stop believing in the person who promised to let them play forever. That promise carried within it poison, a threat from the beginning as "can" play forever twisted into "must", and every wave of glorious games brings with it pain and death. Play isn't play if you never get to stop, and games don't stay fun when there's always the same winner. I love Jamie as a narrator, his voice strikes just the right balance of sounding jaded with enough room to lose even more innocence before the story is through. 

I have two major criticisms but neither of them were enough to make me dislike the book as a whole. The rest of this review will contain minor spoilers, but the spoiler-free version of my critique is twofold: Firstly, I think the way the loss of hands is handled changes the original (animal attack) backstory from one of misfortune to one of malice. It stinks of ableism in a way that makes me uneasy, but I don't have the perspective to know for sure if it's a problem or just kind of odd. Secondly, it misses the mark in its attempt at fulfilling the time-honored Peter Pan retelling tradition of playing with gender in interesting ways. The way it chose was jarring and ultimately boring. 

Read LOST BOY for a story where growing up feels like breaking by inches, and everyone Jamie tries to protect becomes another way to hurt him. 

The idea that the person who would eventually become Captain Hook

first spent a very long time chopping off other people's hands at first was intriguing, it has a "what goes around comes around" feel to it. But what happens instead is that the combination of those mutilations and how sickness is treated by Peter it makes it clear that any kind of imperfection is not only not tolerated, but it makes the person boring to Peter and his boredom is deadly. It seems like on this aspect of abuse the book gets so close to saying something powerful and then just doesn't. The fact that when Jamie was cutting off the hands of every First Mate they then lost that title establishes the pirates as similarly intolerant of this particular physical weakness. Narratively this leaves room for something really great where Jamie is able to be Captain in the end even after losing his hand. However bound up in the idea of the villainous Captain Hook having only one hand is the ableist revulsion at the idea of someone with one hand. When given the opportunity to turn this premise on its head, LOST BOY instead accepts the loss of Jamie's hand as part of the process of Peter turning him into a monster for the future Lost Boys to revile. Ultimately I don't know where I land on this because the endpoint is known: it's a Peter Pan retelling and so Captain Hook is seen as a villain and has one hand. I just wish this said more along the way.

There's a lot of cool ways to explore concepts of gender in a Peter Pan story, especially one which has the title of "Lost Boy" so prominently displayed.

To me, "actually one of the lost boys is a cis girl" wastes that potential space of exploration, especially when the reveal is based on physical characteristics. I'm torn between two reactions. On the one hand, Jamie's instant embrace of Sally's identity and accompanying pronouns has just enough tension between whether to call her "Sal" or "Sally" that it shows that internal struggle of adjusting to a friend's name change without making it about him. If she had told him her name and pronouns in confidence or something it could have been if not great, at least a lot better. The text makes it clear that she considers "Sally" to be her real name and was masquerading as a boy because she thought it would be safer (according to the text, she wasn't wrong, at least where non-Peter dangers are concerned). My problem with this portrayal is that the pronoun switch happens as soon as he glimpses her chest, whereupon he begins using "she" and "her" then asks her real name. It turns what could have been a cool moment into one that feels transphobic because its very framing and execution ignores all possibility of transness in a moment ripe for it. The book erases implicitly the possibility that Sal could have remained Sal to everyone, let alone other possible combinations of identity and revelation in an island that's supposed to only be for boys.

 I couldn't get into this one, the start is really dramatic then slows down a lot and I don't care enough about what's set up to try and push through and see if things pick up later. No major problems with the book itself so far, I'm just not enjoying the experience of reading it so I'm stopping now. 

REVENANT GUN is the excellent conclusion to a trilogy about empire, colonialism, complicity, and the difficult but necessary work of dismantling machineries of oppression... in space.

The way this trilogy as a whole portrays trauma, grief, and cycles of violence is really good. The series arc of The Machineries of Empire is a quest to bring down someone who, a long time ago, swore to prevent a particular harm from happening ever again, and in the name of preventing that singular type of grief committed a whole host of atrocities and created systems to enshrine even more. REVENANT GUN is the endgame of that journey, the final pieces for an attempt which seeks to remove that tyrant forever. 

This is a compelling story in its own right and a fantastic conclusion to the trilogy. As I'll discuss later this wouldn't make sense to pick up and read on its own, but as a story it is technically self-contained. Most of how it requires the first two books is in the worldbuilding and the setup for how things got to the point where this book's ensemble of narrators make the choices they do. Speaking of that ensemble, I'm so happy to finally get a servitor as a point-of-view character! The ensemble of narrators is really great in this one, the mix of new perspectives felt strategically chosen to allow for "where are they now" updates on past narrators while making sure the new narrators had agency and their own storylines. I tend to like books where some mental change in a protagonist is conveyed though changes in their words and behavior, and this series is full of that. REVENANT GUN provides yet another incarnation of Jedao without having disposed of the last one, and it was really cool to see. 

There were some revelations about the way certain things work that make me want to do a re-read of the whole trilogy to see if they show up earlier and I just didn't notice. It's not anything that contradicts the earlier books, just something about the various Moth ships and I'm interested to see if there were clues before the revelation. 

There is a major storyline present here which wasn't present previously, but that storyline is so contingent on the prior books that it's not enough to let this stand on its own (nor is it trying to be). As the last book of a trilogy, this had a very satisfying ending. The major loose ends are tucked away so that it hits just the right balance of conveying how things wind up for the main characters without having a litany of “where are they now” in the final pages. It’s finished as a series but open in possibility with implications of a future for the characters who survived. Each book has had several POV characters and I'm pretty sure that all the narrators for REVENANT GUN are new. Maybe they were around before, but I don't think any are returning narrators. While many characters show up repeatedly in the trilogy, the shifting ensembles are balanced without repetition in a great way. Their voices are distinct and within this book I didn't have trouble tracking who was narrating and what their piece of the story is, so the ensemble cast worked really well both here and in the trilogy as a whole. While major elements of this story are self contained in that they begin here with new main characters and also resolve here... the reasons that any of them are doing anything are so wrapped up in events from the first two books that I don't think this would make much sense if someone read it at random. It's book three of a trilogy, so that's to be expected, but this definitely doesn't slow down to reexplain what should be standard knowledge of the setting by now. Instead it accomplishes a bunch of cool narrative things by complicating what has been known, or featuring characters who are explictly working against what would be expected of them. If read without the mooring of those expectations this would be confusing. My advice, as always, if that if the description intrigues you then you should start with book one (RAVEN STRATAGEM) and go from there.

 *This series was written and published out of in-universe chronological order. The comments in this review are based on reading the series in publishing order, where TWO SERPENTS RISE is read after THREE PARTS DEAD.* 

TWO SERPENTS RISE does with corporate espionage thrillers what THREE PARTS DEAD did with murder mysteries. That is, it takes their tropes and drops them in a world of gods, magic, and contracts where personal grudges and mundane discontent threaten to upend everything that literally hundreds of people have spent their lives working towards.

One place this excels is in taking seriously the idea that the systems in its world are flawed and that it's important to try and fix them. Caleb cares sincerely about making things better, even if he doesn't start out with a clear idea that change is needed immediately or what could be done to fix things. It has the feeling and the actuality of complex negotiations balancing competing needs, all while Caleb works to figure out what good he wants to maximize in the system. 

Caleb and Mal's relationship was strange for me. It has a kind of thrill-seeking at the heart of it that I can't personally identify with, though it definitely works for them as characters. I like Caleb's friendship with Teo, and his relationship with his dad was plot-relevant in ways that I definitely didn't expect at the start. 

I like the world-building but so much ground was laid in THREE PARTS DEAD that some of what I liked might actually have been originally shown there. That also meant that at times it feels like it has both too much and too little information. This builds on a lot of ideas established in the first book, and it discusses them in a way that expands on previous knowledge but also assumes that the reader is at least passingly familiar with the major concepts. It doesn't explain what the gods are or why they're connected to the people and controlled by contracts... but it goes deep into what those gods mean to different people, and why there are so many factions who all think they're right. 

This doesn't wrap up anything from the first book, and the entire storyline starts here and wasn't present before. It's absolutely its own story with many major things introduced and resolved here. It does leave something for later sequels to pick up but the thing it leaves open is so big that I suspect it's a series arc thing rather than something that would be immediately continued in the next book. The main characters are all different from in THREE PARTS DEAD, and each of them feels distinct from one another. TWO SERPENTS RISE doesn't intersect with the first book at all in terms of plot, however it's essential to read THREE PARTS DEAD first because that book was a very detailed crash course on Craft, Gods, and Contracts, which are three essential concepts in this book as well. Someone could muddle through and understand why different things matter if they tried starting here, but THREE PARTS DEAD burned into my brain how Craft, Gods, and Contracts work so thoroughly that I don't even know how this would feel to someone who read it without that grounding. 

I like it overall and I'm looking forward to seeing where the rest of the series goes!

In THIRSTY by M.T. Anderson everyone sucks. Suddenly learning you're a vampire doomed to brief madness before death or (best case scenario) a long life of cannibalism will ruin anyone's day. Looks like it's going to ruin Chris's month.

The thing about THIRSTY is that there are no heroes and no one is actually meant to be likeable. The protagonist is very sympathetic because of his situation, but he's not good. He wants to be, but he's a kid turning into a vampire and (in this world) that means he's doomed to either kill humans or literally go insane as his body turns against him. I hesitate to describe him as a monster (even though he's described as such throughout the text) because of the way the book plays with the idea of monstrosity. Every time Chris tries to figure out what to do and how to exist he's confronted with a way that this too, is monstrous. No one's hands are clean. The entanglement of systems surrounding the existence of vampires in Chris's town is implied to be just one of a multitude of terrible systems around dealing with the reality of the supernatural while trying to make their existence as easy to ignore as possible for human citizens. As a kid I was haunted by the food served at the vampire party and the ending lines of the book. As an adult, the scene where Chris and his mom discuss changelings, to me, perfectly encapsulates the book. It assumes that an unnamed character should simultaneously have done what she did to one of her twin children who was a changeling, while also punishing her for doing the same thing to the other twin who was actually human. She's treated as monstrous for harming her human child but praised for harming her changeling child. It's a stunning moment of cognitive dissonance for Chris's mother who sees one action as praise-worthy and a nearly identical action performed in the same moment as terrible, based on information it was impossible to have beforehand. 

Adding into the theme of "everyone's a monster", many of the content warnings I listed for this are from the human characters being very terrible to each other. Chris engages in bullying one of his best friends by calling him "Jerk" when that's not his name. There's this sense that Chris was part of the bullying because he thought it was normal, and when his world is shaken and he stops being the person he thought was, only then does he start questioning things like why he would insult one of his only friends every time they speak. This doesn't make him suddenly better to his friend (remember, everyone sucks in this book), but he's questioning his actions for the first time. The teenage characters are casually ableist, misogynistic, and actively bully each other. The book itself doesn't seem to condemn these attitudes and at times clearly is against them, and it felt managed to show that they're kind of terrible people, but without inundating the reader with their casual bigotry. 

I loved this as a teen and I'm glad it holds up so well (as long as you know that everyone is terrible and don't think that the author is endorsing any of the bigotry depicted, because they're clearly not). It's funny but it's definitely not lighthearted. It reminds me of Cirque du Freak by Darren Shan, if you liked that series you'll probably like this.

THE WEIGHT OF THE STARS is about connection and desire, a story of love and found family, yearning for the stars while understanding the gravity of the undertaking. 

This is set in the same town as THE WICKER KING a little more than two decades later and it was amazing to see Jack and August again, now as adults. If you haven’t read THE WICKER KING, this will completely make sense without it. If you have read it then it’s a very welcome peek into their lives as they’re helpful adults in the periphery of THE WEIGHT OF STARS.

I’m so happy to see Ryann as a female protagonist who is given space and encouragement to pursue her dreams without worrying about how it will affect anyone else. She cares so much about people, then when it’s a choice between being selfish and selfless after years of feeling like selfless is the only right choice she gets to make her choice. The slow-burn romance builds her up and pushes her to be and do what she wants. It would have been so easy for it to hold her back and being one more thing shelving her dreams. It’s a love story about helping each other be better people, first and foremost, and that makes it so powerful to read. I especially like the portrayal of Ryann's brother and his son. I don't think I've read a book with a nonverbal character who was treated as self-sufficient before, let alone one who is himself taking care of another person. The friend group is numerous enough to really feel like a group with complex interrelationships, but the focus is managed carefully so that the cast stays manageable in scale with the story. I love that there's a heist because I love heists, but it's a relatively minor portion of the book and it's more about what happens around it and what the circumstances of the heist prompt in the relationships between the characters than it is about the actual event. Not a heist story, just a story with a small heist-like thing.

K. Ancrum’s work (specifically but not exclusively THE WICKER KING, LEGEND OF THE GOLDEN RAVEN, and THE WEIGHT OF THE STARS) exists in this strange middle space between realistic fiction and sci-fi/fantasy. It’s not, ultimately, a fantasy story in THE WICKER KING, just like THE WEIGHT OF THE STARS isn’t strict science fiction but plausible science future. If certain real-world private companies trying to get into space had made different decisions then the backstory of anguish and separation undergirding this story could be happening now (though I hope it’s not). Alternate-history? Alternate-contemporary? It’s strange and beautiful, reaching and yearning, a slow-burn romance igniting like a rocket into a strange place where kisses matter but are not the point. Where jars of applesauce add up to time in the sky. Kindness coming back and making things a little bit better, the space to not speak but maintain connection. Unabashedly queer where that means LGBTQ+ but also strange, odd, a cluster of found family when "no one likes me" and "I am afraid" is met with "sit with us".

This is for when you want to feel like magic is real and the stars can be felt, for just a little while, but the rest of the world isn’t asked to stop. It won’t and it can’t. But for a time the world is brighter with every turning page.

THE WOLF OF OREN-YARO begins with a queen journeying to meet her estranged husband, then abruptly transforms into a flight from assassins and a struggle just to survive in a strange land where her name means nothing.

The world-building is excellent, with just the right combination of novelty and repetition to introduce and then reinforce ideas and details throughout the story without any one section feeling like infodumping. The convoluted machinations involved appeared at first to be simple, then were gradually questioned and complicated until the final reveal makes things suddenly make sense in a really cool way. While the politics matter, the heart of the story is how Talyien interacts with the ordinary people that she's around for the first time in her life, and what choices she makes under each new and trying circumstance. My favorite individual scenes were the scams, because I love heists, and my favorite secondary character is Khine. I love the way that he and Talyien build this friendship without feeling like the narrative is pushing them together romantically. He has his own baggage, she's literally trying to track down and possibly reconcile with her husband, and they just work really well as characters whenever they're in scenes together. It's either genuinely a platonic friendship or the slowest of slow burn romances, and either way it bodes well for the rest of the trilogy. As for Talyien herself, she's a fantastic narrator. While I was firmly on team "Rayyel isn't worth it" from the start of the book, I understand why she makes the choices she does even if they're definitely not the ones I would make. 

I'm definitely interested in seeing where the rest of this series goes. It was a stressful read in places due to imminent danger to characters I like, and very good overall.