THE COST OF KNOWING is about the time stolen from young Black men who don't get to be Black boys, torn between fear of the future and dread of the past while trying not to miss the present. 

This is gripping and immersive, the recursive cadence of Alex's visions as he attempts to get through his day disrupt his peace and raise his anxiety while creating a very distinctive feeling in the text. Alex thinks a lot about the way he's grown up, how much he doesn't feel like a man but he also doesn't get to be a kid, be a teenager. It's obvious how much the way he treats his brother as the plot takes off is driven by a desire to let Isaiah actually be a kid, to not have to shoulder the burdens he has. 

The interstitials at first seemed like an odd start to a book, but by the time I saw those simple lines for the last time they filled me with dread. The brevity and starkness reveal how those characters see themselves, set against the emotion-drenched detail of the rest of the story as we learn how Alex sees them when he thinks of them at all. I don't mean to be coy, I just don't want to spoil what the interstitials are or who they're describing, since I think that realization is important, whether you know immediately or it takes all the way until the end. 

The ending is perfect for this book. I wanted things to be different for the characters I'd gotten to know, but the book never tricked me and I could see (and dread) it coming from far away. It slowly changes from knowing the inevitable and doing things anyway, to not letting fear of what seems inevitable keep you from living. My attempts to describe the point feel flimsy, and the only succor I can offer is that if I have intrigued you, you should read this book. Read this story of Black boy joy and grief amidst it all, because waiting until it's over means missing everything.

THE GIRL FROM THE WELL is a ghost story from the perspective of the haunter, helping a boy get free from the spirit under his skin, punishing the murderers of children along the way. 

I love Okiku as a narrator, the way the text occasionally stutters and jumps to convey her mood helps to build tension. The way Okiku feels like a strange mix between deeply invested narrator and impartial observer meant that I would often forget that this was from her perspective, only to have that illusion broken when she counted things or the text caught and jumped because something interesting or stressful happened. The lulls where I briefly forgot it was her helped to build tension, though I think it would be differently good form of tension if someone were very aware of her ghostly status. 

One of my favorite things is how she keeps doing the avenging ghost thing she's been doing for hundreds of years. Like, she'll be doing things in furtherance of the main plot, and then go away from the human secondary characters and take care of some vengeance and then come back. It helps to make her history feel real instead of having her immediately halt everything for this one person. The story is about how knowing him changes her, but it happens gradually without erasing who she is. The aftercare is good, conveying the characters moving on and healing afterwards.

I liked this a lot and I'll definitely read the sequel, the way the status quo changes is intriguing and I want to know what happens next.

MAGIC FOR NOTHING takes Antimony double-undercover as her infiltration of the Covenant sends her to join a circus and investigate some disappearances with the help of borrowed knives and some unexpected friends.

Antimony is my favorite narrator so far. Her descriptions are fantastic on their own, but part of what she brings to the series canon of the family is a view of the various members that feels very different from Verity and Alex. After five books reducing her to the pit trap girl who also skates, understanding why she's that way was really great, without outright contradicting the essence of her siblings stories about their childhoods. It's askew in the way that people who were all present will remember thing differently because they're not the same person and they cared about different pieces. I love Sam as a character, his initial surliness has a very understandable and non-malicious reason, and the way he slowly warms to Antimony felt natural. It took long enough to be believable but didn’t take so long as to drag. I’m creeped out by Leo, he’s a surprisingly deep character who I would never want to be around but I enjoy reading about.

The roller derby descriptions were great, with the level of detail which implies either a personal history or excellent research (jams are closer to downs than innings, but that's a minor quibble). This was the first sport/activity in this series where I'm familiar enough to weigh in on accuracy, so I enjoyed that. I also loved the circus info, but there I have zero ability to weigh in.

This doesn’t specifically wrap up anything left over from the previous book, but the inciting incident was the finale of CHAOS CHOREOGRAPHY, and this is about how the Price family reacts to Verity’s very public actions. The main storyline starts here and wasn’t present previously, and a few major things are introduced and resolved in this volume. It’s not the last book and it leaves some specific things to be addressed later. Antimony’s voice is very distinct from the previous narrators (her siblings) and she’s my favorite so far. Her style is a little more wry and a lot more realistic than Verity, and her thoughts about her siblings as people are more complex than her siblings’ characterizations of her, in a way that made them really feel like a family paying different levels of attention to each other. The main plot would mostly make sense if someone picked this up at random and didn’t know about the series, but if someone were to start mid-series then CHAOS CHOREOGRAPHY would be a better place (as always I recommend starting with book one if you have the option). Both books are mostly self-contained but the whole reason for the events of MAGIC FOR NOTHING to exist is because of the ending of CHAOS CHOREOGRAPHY, and reading it without that backstory would lose a lot of the emotional context. 

If you've loved the series so far, definitely read this one. If following a family of cryptozoologists who are constantly undercover and occasionally double-undercover sounds like your thing, don't miss the series.

I started reading this a week after reading the first book, WICKED SAINTS, and I don't know what's happening or why I should care. I mention the timeframe to make it clear that my confusion is not a result of waiting a long time between reading the first book and picking up the sequel. I'm perfectly fine being confused by a book, there are some I've praised for being fascinating while also spending a long time being largely incomprehensible. But I just can't get into the central motivation of "girl must save demon nightmare boy from something (???) by doing something (???)". I can handle a book being boring for a little while, and I'm fine with confusion, but this combination of unclear stakes, revelations without enough tension, general lack of context, and a plot I just can't get into means I'm going ahead and stopping now. 

THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS is a brief story of complicity and abuse in a city where most have decided that the happiness of many is worth the abject misery of one.

This story is short with a simple but heartbreaking premise: that the happiness of an entire city depends on the abuse and misery of a small child, where the justification for the child's mistreatment is that its low intelligence and the abuse it has undergone until this point mean it wouldn't even know what to do if it were freed. Anyone who stays in the city past a certain age where they are shown the child does so with the knowledge that everything good for them is dependent on this child suffering. It's brief and well worth reading.

For me one of the most interesting parts of the story is the way that the abuse until the point is used to justify further abuse. The idea that only by thinking about one child suffering can these people be kind to the other children, and that now that the child has been abused they may as well stay that way because rescue and rehabilitation would be difficult and might never fully work... it's unfortunately (and clearly purposefully) close to the attitudes that are used in the real world to justify a whole host of ills.

Two years after the invasion and near-total genocide of humanity, and alien and a human bond over the power of music and a love of stories while they try to save the people who are left.

I love Ellie and I like Morris, their relationship takes enough time to deepen for it to not feel like trauma bonding, which is really important given the massive power gap when he's part of the alien invasion and she's trying to survive. This does a lot of great things well that I haven't seen much in YA, from frank and non-judgmental discussions of whether they've had other partners, to actually addressing how dressing for the apocalypse results in some physically uncomfortable and very hodge-podge outfits.

This has lot of really great characterization. Ellie repeatedly uses a calming technique to try and avoid panic attacks in stressful situations, or try and calm down when one is starting. I loved this narrative choice, because it conveys how anxious she is without constantly relaying her anxious thoughts. Switching between two narrators helps keep the lying from getting too stressful, especially when there are things that Morris doesn’t feel like he can tell Ellie, or Ellie isn’t ready to trust Morris with. They’re reliable narrators as individuals, but not always to each other, especially in part two, but part of the point of the story is how they work though that and learn to trust each other as they get closer. Part One felt a bit uneven with a lot of infodumps and a lot of explanations. It was trying to handle a lot of world-building really quickly, and it did a pretty good job, it just wasn’t to my personal tastes. Part Two had more room to maneuver now that the backstory was set up, and got into the first phase of the adventure. It also features a different kind of tension between the protagonists. Part Three focuses on the way their relationship is changing, and Part Four is about a final confrontation and what happens next. I liked the second half better than the first, but the plot arc is solid and I'm pretty happy with how it turns out.

I think I would love this book rather than just like it if I cared more about music. The story is extremely up front about being a love/save-the-planet adventure about connecting through music and books, and I loved the book bits and didn't care about the music bits, but they seemed to be well done. It's definitely a me thing, not anything wrong with the story. If you're a bit meh about music and connecting with people through it, then this won't be the book for you. If you're reading this review and slightly aghast that anyone wouldn't care about music, then you'll probably love this. 

CHAOS CHOREOGRAPHY offers Verity one last hurrah as Valerie in the world of competitive dance when “Dance or Die” gets a bit too literal for anyone’s comfort. 

After how much Verity talked about dance last time she was narrating, I'm glad we get the chance to see her as Valerie. In the previous books it was obvious how much she loved the world of cryptozoology, here we get a tour of her love of dance rather than just being told about it. It shows enough of the competition to immerse the reader in that world before Verity starts having to take over for Valerie more and more as the body count becomes decidedly non-zero. I love Valerie as a narrator, and the family member who drops in to surprise her was a violent delight. 

This doesn't wrap up anything from the book directly prior, but it does have a lot of closure from the last time we had Verity as narrator, with a nice follow-up to some events in the very first book. The main storyline starts here and wasn't present in the last book. Several major things are introduced and resolved here. It's not the last book, and it ends by intimating a rather spectacular status change which leaves a lot for future sequels to pick up. The main character is different from the last book but she's the same from the first two books in the series. Verity's narrative voice is distinct from Alex, the other main narrator so far. This would probably make sense even if someone read this without having read anything else in the series, but it is a pretty direct follow-up to the events of DISCOUNT ARMAGEDDON and MIDNIGHT BLUE-LIGHT SPECIAL. 

This is a great entry in the series, and I like having an example of the series revisiting an earlier narrator after having moved on to someone new. 

POCKET APOCALYPSE takes transformational body horror to some strange and terrifying places when Alex and Shelby head to Australia to try and control an invasive werewolf outbreak.

Intellectually, I love this version of werewolves. They have an internal logic to their features which is a great blend of folklore and the science-adjacent flavor of this series. Emotionally, this was terrifying, I didn't anticipate that a creature-feature story was going to make me that afraid of a monster I already know and love so well. 

The way Alex immediately draws parallels between his family and Shelby's and then has to swiftly discard them in order to get a handle on what's actually going on was really well handled. It plays into the book's themes of prejudice and intolerance in a way that makes in clear that Alex isn't infallible, just trained. As much as he's trying to get his unwilling hosts to budget a little he has a lot to learn too. Meeting this group who are differently secretive and twitchy than the Price/Healy family was an interesting and mostly good emotional rollercoaster. The characters are vibrant and instantly memorable, even (perhaps especially) the ones I disliked. I hated Shelby's dad so much. He's a fascinating character but someone I instantly detested as soon as he started in on Alex. His single-minded hatred of who Alex is and what he represents is great thematically for the book, but I still don't like him. One of the things I appreciate about this series is that the characters grow and change, even within a single volume. Not enough to be too much to follow, but a very reasonable amount for the kinds of realizations and epiphanies that their line of work primes them for, where "primes" is code for "repeatedly places in danger", and almost-but-not-actually-dying is great for generating epiphanies and reassessing one's priorities in life.

I was pleasantly surprised by how this wraps up something from the previous book, or at least moves it along in a meaningful way. Due to the episodic nature of this series I wasn't counting on that closure, but I like what happened. The main storyline starts here and wasn't present previously. There are several major things which are introduced and resolved here, and a pretty important thing left for some future sequel to address, whether or not that sequel is from Alex's perspective. The MC is the same as the last book and his narration is consistent. I think this would mostly make sense if someone came across it at random and didn't know about the series, but since this is the second book starring Alex it would be better to go back one for HALF-OFF RAGNAROK.

DROWNED COUNTRY picks up two years after SILVER IN THE WOOD to show how Silver and Tobias are adjusting to their new lives, what begins as a hunt for a vampire twists into something stranger as the girl they were sent to rescue is no damsel in distress.

SILVER IN THE WOOD didn't really feel like it left anything hanging for DROWNED COUNTRY to pick up, so while this does bring more of a resolution than the first book did, I don't really thing it wrapped up anything left loose, per se. The main storyline begins here and was not present in the first book, and contains several major things which are both introduced and resolved here. It is the last book in the duology and while SILVER IN THE WOOD had a satisfying ending, DROWNED COUNTRY brings a more emotionally complete ending which I like much better as a stopping point for observing this story. The point-of-view character changed from the first book, rather than following Tobias we're getting Silver's perspective. The third-person parts of the narration feel very similar across both books, but the two men have very different manners of speech and thought and the text conveys that well. This wouldn't make much sense if you skipped SILVER IN THE WOOD to read this. They're both novellas and DROWNED COUNTRY simply doesn't have room to retread the ground that SILVER IN THE WOOD already covered. There's enough context to be an adequate reminder for anyone who waited between reading the two books, but it's referential instead of explanatory, and I think someone who tried to start at here would feel like many things are missing.

At first I was a bit confused by the way the book starts out with Silver and Tobias somewhat estranged, given how the previous book left things, but it does circle back to show what happened before. I like this as a follow-up, it gives a much more satisfying ending as a duology than what SILVER IN THE WOOD had on its own. 

SPARROW HILL ROAD meanders back and forth across the US and through time as Rose guides her fellow departed, and nudges those who have a chance to stay with the living.

This is structured as a collection of short stories following one ghost's journey, woven together until the final tale is the culmination of everything that came before. As every ghost story has echoes and variations, these too have repetition in the framing but distinction in the details, with Rose's voice as a throughline. I like the cadence of the sections individually and the book as a whole.