In THE AFTERWARD, the heroes have to live somehow when the big quest is done: A thief too well-recognized to pull off a heist and a knight who must marry as the price of her armor. Told in alternating sections between Before and After, THE AFTERWARD shows how if the journey changes you until you can never really go home again, you had best make something new with those you love.

I love the way the Before sections don't try too hard to convey the precise details of the quest from a year ago. It shows glimpses to provide context for the After sections, but it's much more loosely connected and feels like it covers much more time than the more focused After section. In the After, Kalanthe and Olsa are trying to figure out what happens after they became big damn heroes at seventeen but still have to live the rest of their lives. The heart of the story is each of them figuring out whether the romance they had on the road can be part of their future. The two parts of the book are really well balanced and I loved the overall effect. 

This book has a quest, but it is not, fundamentally, a book about a quest. It's about two young women who were in love and probably still are, taking the time to do things on their own for a while. I love the setting, I love the characters, I just had so much fun reading this that I didn't want it to be over.

The rest of this review briefly discusses some medical conditions portrayed in the book and contains minor spoilers.

As someone who had a traumatic brain injury, I appreciated the representation here. Thankfully I'm more recovered than the character living with a magically induced TBI in the After section, but the modified hood she wears and the way she frankly discusses the way she's living with her particular TBI were really cathartic to read.

There is a character with an aneurism, who knows he has one and dies from it during the story. His exit is plot-convenient, but he also existed in the first place to help resolve some problems for one of the main characters. He gets what, for him, is explicitly the best possible ending, but I don't know if this portrayal might be distressing for people who know that they share his medical condition.

WE HUNT THE FLAME drips with lush descriptions and evocative imagery, linked by the often scattered thoughts of two very different narrators as circumstances and a bit of a death-wish pull them inexorably closer.

I loved the setting and most of the characters. I was frequently lost in the prose of an individual moment but I find myself now able to recall the entire story, somehow whole in my mind even as the scenes sometimes felt scattered. If you’re reading this for the beautiful setting, twisting quest of a plot, and intense yearning to belong, you’ll love this. I plan to read the sequel because I want to know how this story ends. It’s literally part one of two, so a lot of stuff was left open to be handled later, but there’s a definite endpoint to the initial quest which brought everyone together. 

The world-building is really really good, especially around language. The text is full of places where a word is left untranslated from the speaker's dialect (or possibly a completely different language, depending on the instance) and the point-of-view character thinks about the meaning in a way that conveys the translation. It happens a lot and helps to deepen immersion in the setting, since the the various regions having different dialects/languages is a very important part of this world.

If you’re planning on reading this because you heard it was queer, my answer is that it probably is, but I cannot predict whether you’ll be satisfied by the portrayals within.

There’s a character whose every word drips with what looks like queer longing, but the main person he’s been possibly flirting with is completely off limits for plot reasons and he knows it the whole time. There’s a woman who dresses as a man and jokes about kissing her sister of the heart, but they don’t kiss, she drops the masculine guise very early on, and she ends up with a guy. It feels either like it was heading for maximum queerness in a society which punishes women simply for existing (the male guise was necessary for the main character to feed her family), or one which describes very intense bonds but resolutely caps any possibly queer bonds at platonic, no matter how intensely they banter and stare at each other. I don’t know whether almost everyone was straight or if several key characters were bi, but the book also doesn’t provide an answer. And so I’m left with “is it queer? Yeah, probably.

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA is about friendship, loneliness, sexism, bullying, rural isolation, and grief. Jesse is a lonely boy with too many sisters who meets a kid named Leslie, together they make invisible castles in the trees, finding out that even their bullies have bullies and nothing lasts forever. 

Reading this as an adult, I'm struck by how Jesse thought that Leslie was making up from scratch stories like Moby Dick and Hamlet, it's just one small moment that exemplifies how good this book is at relaying through Jesse things that he doesn't actually understand but just tells like he sees them, allowing a younger reader to follow his thoughts as a fellow kid, or for an older one to understand the bits he missed. Leslie and Jesse bump into sexism and gendered constraints, often pushing through them and sometimes having to keep their heads down and fit in a bit longer. The kids feel like kids, not always saying or doing the right thing but trying their best. I like the way Jesse's relationship with his younger sister changes throughout the book, especially at the end when he's actively working to be a better brother to her and prompting her to be a better sibling to their even younger sister who's still a toddler.

I probably wouldn't give this particular book to people who are kids now, mainly due to ableist language which is unchallenged in the text, but it meant a lot to me when I first read it. It's the kind of book that haunts long after you put it down. 

This book is famous for a shocking event that occurs near the end and transforms the tone of the book. This review contains spoilers from here on out. 

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BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA is not free of trauma before the death. One could argue that it hints at the possibility by having the kids discuss the idea of death several chapters before it becomes suddenly relevant. Part of the point is that it's sudden. That it's sudden, and unfair, and it rocks Jesse's sense of how the world is, how it ought to be. Jesse's numb grief and conflicted emotions reactions to being unable to see Leslie again, along with his bursts of anger when his younger sister pesters him about it, make it feel very real. I'm glad that we're (hopefully) past the point that this book where the gender non-conforming atheist character dies might be the only queer representation one someone's shelf. 

*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book. 
This collection is, unfortunately, above my personal threshold for horror (I'm more of a creature-feature person) and I had to stop reading. I loved the story "Comorbidity" and the use of the profiles as a framing device was a nice touch. 

THE SUFFERING is unabashedly a horror story, one which cares about its characters, even the ghastly and/or murderous ones. It's also a platonic love story between two very broken people, helping to right past wrongs and stop the dying. It's an excellent follow-up to THE GIRL FROM THE WELL, from the perspective of the haunted one this time, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

This resolves a major thing left hanging from the previous book. The main storyline starts here and wasn't present previously, and it is resolved by the end. Currently it's book two in a duology (I see no indications of a third in the future), and it feels very complete. It provides emotional resolution to some things left open from the first book, and it makes clear what kind of live the characters will have after the pages end. It feels finished and I'm very content with how things wrapped up. The main character changed and is very distinct from the first narrator. Since the emotional core of this book is the way Tark and Okiku's relationship changes and settles after the events of the first book, if you read this without knowing why they got here then the ending of this book definitely won't be as satisfying. I think most of the main plot would make sense, but very basic questions like "why does this guy want to drop everything to go help these people right now" were set up by THE GIRL FROM THE WELL. 

I love Tark as a narrator, and it's so good to see him gaining a sense of agency after the events of the first book. He and Okiku have a great rapport and I'm just so happy with how this handled their friendship. If you liked the first book you'll almost definitely like this one (though since Okiku isn't narrating there's much less counting of objects). If you enjoy horror stories about compassion, hauntings, and setting right the wrongs of the past, read this duology. 

My favorites in the collection are “Be Cool for Once”, “Don’t Pass Me By”, “Catch, Pull, Drive”, and “Super Human”. There’s a lot of variation in setting, theme, and character backgrounds across the stories, so it’s hard to pin down a theme of the collection, except that the point was to have a lot of variety. Most of the stories are deeply intertwined with a character's marginalized identity, sometimes they're about the way the characters are marginalized and in a few of them they get to just exist. Overall it works and it’s well worth checking out. 

I just couldn’t get into it and didn’t like the main character.

I like this opportunity to get Sam and Mindy’s perspectives. It’s a brief story but good. The Aeslin Mice are fascinating, and I'll happily read anything about how they view their world.

TRICKS FOR FREE finds Antimony lying low as a worker in an amusement park, immersing herself in corporate jargon and plastered on smiles... until the accidents start. 

This book exists, in a lot of ways, to wrap up or at least try to cope with a bunch of stuff that just happened in the previous books. It does have a main storyline which starts here and wasn't present previously, along with several major things which are introduced and resolved. It leaves a pretty major thing to be addressed by later books. The main character is the same as the last book but hasn't been the narrator for the whole series. She's still my favorite narrator so far and feels very different from either of her siblings (the previous narrators). This book would not make sense if someone picked it up at random and didn't know about the series. Not only that, but it relies on backstory established in a companion series (Ghost Roads, start with Sparrow Hill Road). There's a lot of complicated information that matters, the kind that truly relies on the previous book at minimum, or the last two books plus Sparrow Hill Road if possible. This makes for an extremely satisfying character arc for Antimony and a great story if you're up to speed, but probably a less than ideal experience if you're attempting to get into this series by starting here on book seven. As always I do recommend having read the whole Incryptid series so far, but this time it also matters whether you've started the Ghost Roads.

As much as I care whether someone could pick up a particular volume at random in a series, sometimes the answer is emphatically no, and this time it's for very good reasons. This is my favorite book so far, and part of what makes it so good is that it has the context of the entire series behind it. The rest of this review will contain minor spoilers for previous books but no spoilers for Tricks For Free.

The books narrated by Antimony's siblings characterized her as the youngest Price, with a penchant for making pit traps and a willingness to bloody her siblings with her antics. MAGIC FOR NOTHING featured Antimony's perspective for the first time, stuck stepping in to try and fix Verity's mess from CHAOS CHOREOGRAPHY. There's she's not an afterthought to her family, but if they could have sent literally anyone else undercover they would have. Instead, for plot reasons, it has to be her. She's supposed to have family support but ends up so dramatically defying the Covenant (in a move more dramatic than Verity's but at least not on live television) and has to flee.

Now, in TRICKS FOR FREE, she's on her own as much as anyone with a ghostly pseudo-babysitter can be. She gets to showcase how she acts when she's not under her siblings' shadows, when she has some friends and allies but few resources (and even fewer knives). I think she really shines here, mentioning her family in her narration but no longer obsessed with how she does or does not stand out from her siblings generally and Verity in particular. I like her friends, I like the recurring characters who show up in the clinch, and I love this book. 

In THE GIRL IN THE GREEN SILK GOWN, Rose has to find her way back to the roads she loves after Bobby Cross, the man who killed her sixty years ago, disturbs her wanderings in the Twilight.

I enjoyed THE GIRL IN THE GREEN SILK GOWN as a more straightforward narrative after the connected short story structure of SPARROW HILLL ROAD (I like them both, but while the short stories were good as an introduction to Rose's world, I do prefer the familiar structure of a novel). The mythology of the Ghost Roads is fascinating and it was nice to get a more focused version of it here, as well as more information about this series' version of Persephone. Rose is a great narrator and Bobby is a terrifying villain casting a long shadow. It feels like the first book was more about introducing the roles played by the denizens of the Twilight and the Daylight who fill Rose's time, and then this circled back to spend a lot more time with a few of them as people, not just their situations. 

This wraps up a pretty major thing left hanging from the first book. The main storyline starts here and wasn't present previously. There are several major things introduced and resolved in this volume. It's not the last book and it leaves a very major thing to be picked up by any sequels. The main character is the same as in the previous books. I think the main plot would mostly make sense if someone picked this up and hadn't read the first book, but it uses a lot of terms for a bunch of different types of ghosts and sometimes the emotional tension in a moment depends on things like  understanding just why summoning a crossroads ghost would be a very bad idea, something that's a little harder to resonate with if you skipped book one. It also depends on two people with some bad history having to work together, and the first book is where that bad history is established. It might make sense without that knowledge, but if something is confusing here and you didn't read SPARROW HILL ROAD, you'll probably find your answers there (for what remains unanswered, read the Incryptid series).