THE WOLF AND THE WOODSMAN is an enemies-to-lovers tale filled with bickering and tender moments of wound-care. It luxuriates in tense conversation, short back-and-forth dialogues punctuated by stony silence and snow. The MC’s narrative ruminations on her traveling companion deftly show what she thinks of him while leaving room for something more in his body language that an interested reader might puzzle out. They fill the silence in a way that ensures the reader is never left alone, even while the MC is trapped in her head, relentlessly pondering the meaning of every word, silence, and gesture from the Woodsman. They are drawn together by a strangely aligned goals that have, at minimum, a destination in common for both of them. Once at this destination, the narrative opens somewhat while still keeping focus on the weight of words and the way they can twist in an instant from toying to cruel, from mild interest to genuine warmth. Its slowly widening scope introduces the political tightrope the MC must traverse. Here it becomes apparent that amid all that travel, banter, and attempts to not fall in love was a lot of very important information about the power structure and current state of the kingdom and its leader. I really like political structures in fantasy, and therefore was very interested in this one, but it isn’t a politically dense book. It conveyed really well essential social information in a seemingly inconsequential manner before the MC arrived in locations where she needed to use that knowledge, and I appreciate how well it was worked in. 

One of the strengths of this as an enemies-to-lovers story was that the MC and the eventual love interest had pretty good reasons to dislike each other as kinds of people, but not to already hate each other specifically, which made the transformation from ire to romance feel believable but not rushed. A lot of really excellent emotional groundwork and world-building was laid in the first half of the book, which meant that the second half could carefully subvert some (but not all) of those expectations and play with their implications in some really great ways. I feel a little as though that’s just how good books work, but the first and second half feel so distinct to me. Each had their own unique flavor which made the whole book sing. The world building is really good. I like the way that there were canonically several paths to magic, all of which are different in their particulars but involve some combination of access, mastery, and sacrifice. The MC begins the book thinking that she is unable to use the path that everyone has been expecting her to have. she finds her way into the path that’s good for her; not wholly new ground, something recognizable to those around her even if her specific blend is a bit strange. 

SILVER IN THE WOOD is a fae-adjacent romance where a Wild Man finds himself falling in love with a curious newcomer to the wood, digging up secrets long buried.

The characters are nuanced and deep, impressively so for such a short book. I liked everything: the world building; the romance; the characters; the plot. The slow-burn pace makes it feel like it builds forever, while the low page count makes it take no time at all. I'll definitely read the sequel.

I feel a bit broken and shaky, like I'll probably cry when I get a chance. I’d been warned that there were very graphic depictions of trauma in this book, so I spent the first three quarters wondering whether I just had a high threshold for fictional depictions of trauma or if I just hadn’t gotten to the worst of it yet. I just hadn’t gotten there. There are some things so awful that just saying what they are is enough to turn your stomach, and the litanies of events in this war are such things. It's not made any easier by knowing that they're based on real events, for more information please refer to "A Note from the Author" at the back of the book. These events are crucial to the plot, as it's a story about how a teenage girl gradually breaks from a focused and idealistic war orphan into a shape driven to wield rage and wage war, and how the power she intends to wield is so immense and all-consuming that only the driven and damned would court it. 

The characters are vibrant and distinct, even the ones the MC doesn't like are interesting as individuals. I felt like I really got to know them during the first half or so of the book. It showed at times how individual characters understand the same events differently, and I didn't always find myself agreeing with the MC's interpretation. I understood why even some minor characters made their choices. The narrative continually conveys nuanced and varied interpretations of events, making it feel simultaneously like there were so many better options and also like, for these particular characters, there was no other way. It's deftly done. 

Read this if you like books featuring war in a fantasy setting with excellent worldbuilding and a large cast of complex characters. Read it when you're ready to feel broken.

I didn't think it was possible for me to feel "meh" about a heist retelling, but here we are. SPEECHLESS is about a teenager named Aria who can breathe underwater because she's an "aberration" in a world mostly populated with otherwise "normal" people. She wants to join a mission to Mars and enters the selection process without telling her father, then is sent on a dangerous secret mission.

Retellings, generally speaking, have one of two directions they can go: either they keep the shape of the original so that the plot and most of the characters are recognizable but exist in a new setting, or they take elements of the original and reshape them into something wholly new which might reference the original but has completely transformed it. Both methods have their strengths and neither is necessarily better than the other. The danger in the first method is that if you do too many things just because the original did them, you end up with a story whose only reason to exist is to remind of you another, possibly better story that you're not reading because you're reading this one. SPEECHLESS stays so near the original that I could predict what was going to happen at a bunch of moments which were supposed to be tense merely because I know what happens in Disney's version of The Little Mermaid. The one time I was wrong about what happened, right at the end, I was disappointed by what I found instead. By following the original so closely, when it finally broke out and did something to suit its own story it turned out that it wasn't a story I liked. It undercut all the emotional buildup and minimized the importance of most of the plot by returning the MC to a state only barely different from how things were before the "Prince Eric" section of the book. The emotional core of The Little Mermaid doesn't have to be the relationship with the Eric character (Enrique in this version), but having it set up as the core and then get yanked away didn't feel great as a reader. If these were my only complaints then it would just be a book that isn't a good fit for me rather than one I actively don't recommend. But it does have more problems, specifically a badly-handled sci-fi version of marginalization and a bunch of ableism.

There are anti-aberration movements including a hate parade which the MC and her brother briefly walk through. It was very uncomfortable for me to, as a queer person, read a scene which felt like it was a thinly veiled allegory for real world hate speech. I suspect but don't know for sure that it would be similarly uncomfortable for people from other marginalized groups who are real-world targets of hate speech. It was there just to make the person with her realize that things were serious for her, but this is someone who should definitely have known the personal stakes already so it felt both distressing and pointless as a scene. It was really stressful and the best thing I can say about it is that it was brief. 

The ableism in the text started out seemingly minor and then became more and more obvious as the book continued. The first hint that this text about a character who I was pretty sure was going to stop being able to talk at some point might have some problems with ableism was when she's underwater with her brother and they can't communicate while submerged, despite it being that they are frequent underwater salvagers. I'm not asking for them to necessarily be fluent in ASL, but it was weird that they seemed to have not even very basic personal hand signs for communicating important things underwater when apparently they do this all the time. Later on when the MC does lose her speech she's able to communicate via already-established technology, so that was nice, but her related leg pain (caused by the same device that messed with her speech) felt like it was just in the story to complete the mermaid allegory. The only thing it contributed was to mess with her at plot convenient times. While characters being in pain is pretty normal in stories, I'd like to actually be relevant, please, otherwise I'm just watching someone in agonizing pain for no reason other than that someone had trouble walking in some other story. On the subject of things present just to complete the Little Mermaid retelling, there's an entire character who only exists to make certain parallels happen. This character has very little agency, is a probably mentally ill person who isn't getting the care they need because of [spoiler-filled plot justifications], and, I can't emphasize this enough, is only in the story so that the plot can happen to the main character. I ended this book genuinely more worried about this minor character who never gets to actually do anything than I am about the cliffhanger-filled predicament of the MC at the conclusion of the story. Her story seems way more fascinating than anything going on with the actual MC, and if the plot had turned into a mission to break her out after seeing her predicament I think I would have liked that a lot more (depending on how it was handled, of course). Instead she's window dressing on someone else's story, with less relevance than the object of the fetch-quest.

I feel woefully ill-equipped to get into the layers of terribleness surrounding this next point, but the MC is described as being lighter than the person she impersonates, so along with everything else there’s brownface happening. The text doesn’t dwell on it and it doesn’t go beyond appearance, but it’s still bad.

The pointless ableism is especially frustrating because the big twist around the Mars mission is genuinely interesting and I want to know a bunch more about what kind of world did this, what technology actually works and what's not what was promised. There's a lot of room for some very cool stories in this setting, and maybe any sequels will get there. But I'm not interested in finding out whether they manage it, not after how things went in this first book. 

*Rating edited downward because late in the book a character refers to plans for a Birthright trip and it is unchallenged in the narrative.

DEAR JUSTYCE follows Quan from DEAR MARTIN as he tells his friend Justyce about his life before he was incarcerated during the previous book. Told in a combination of flashbacks and letters to Justyce, this is a contemplation of the past with a chance at having a future. 

There’s so much care in this story, it’s evident in every page. In terms of narrative structure, it begins with the MC in prison, waiting for the outcome of his case but not hoping for much. It traces how he got there, how the turning points never felt like choices because of the system stacked against him as a Black boy then a Black teenager, then a young Black man. It's not trying to be a litany of traumas or disasters, the framing is that most of the sudden traumas were a long time ago, and that distance helps a bit. He's slowly gaining the tools to place his life in context and see how the pieces fit together, while also keeping tabs on the present. 

Now for the sequel check. The whole point of this story us to wrap up some thing left hanging from the previous book, namely: what happened to Quan after the events of DEAR MARTIN. There are several storylines which start in this book and were not present previously. Technically a bunch of the stuff that is resolved in this book was started in the first one, but this is definitely its own story within the series. I don’t know if there will be any more in this series, it looks like the first one was intended to be a stand-alone book, and this features someone who was a secondary character there. If this is the end of the series, it feels pretty complete, but there are definitely a lot of good candidates for another story if the author continues the series. Quan’s voice here is distinct from Justyce’s narration in the first book. This would definitely make sense if someone started with this book and hadn’t read the first one. 

Some of the secondary characters don’t get very much narrative attention here, but given that Quan literally isn’t able to spend any time with most of them, it would be more surprising if they had a lot of space on the page. As it stands, the snippets were enough to remind me of who they were from DEAR MARTIN if they were returning characters, and it was nice to see most of them again. The author is really good at making characters distinct and vibrant with minimal description, and that shone here. 

“A superhero and a super villain meet in AA and decide to team up” is a remarkably simple and excellent premise, brilliantly told and nearly flawlessly executed in WE COULD BE HEROES. Their changing relationship feels really natural, with a lot of give-and-take of trust and information, slowly building into a finale where I was on the edge of my seat to find out what would happen. 

Above all else this book is fun. Yes, there’s danger (sometimes a lot of danger), and the stakes are really huge for the characters, but watching them was an adventure. The way they went about their heroics and their villainy totally fit their personalities and helped tell me more about them, long before they were explaining themselves to each other. It’s heartfelt and earnest without being sappy. The main characters are vibrant and very distinct from each other, they have totally different ways of seeing the world and it was really easy to track who was who. I liked the way their individual goals fit into their eventual shared goal without feeling like either of them completely changed just to suit the plot. 

I love this and I’d happily read more in this setting if it ever gets a sequel, but it’s very satisfying as a stand-alone superhero story.

EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEAR is about a girl reclaiming her agency, and the friendships which help her before and after; a story about a rape which does not make the reader watch violation. The framing and emphasis centers the MC in a way that acknowledges that she was victimized, and is about what happens after, but is never interested in seeing her suffer. It conveys the raw and sometimes tumultuous emotions of the MC, usually in ways that show either her messy initial reaction and then revisit the thoughts again when she’s able to talk to someone and get help. I never felt like a voyeur to her pain, more like someone who is hearing her reflections on this experience later. It’s about her senior year: the last year of high school, her last year as a cheerleader, and her complicated emotions about having this transitional phase in her life made stranger by this thing that was done to her. 

There are a lot of moments I loved in this book, but I think one of the most important ones is the prologue, a snapshot of a small moment which actually takes place midway through the book, but frames the early events so that the reader has an idea from the start that the MC will be okay. That prologue told me that the author was writing this with care. This let me trust that this would be handled well, and I was not disappointed. The MC's relationship with her best friend was a steadying touch in bleak moments, and though I think the prologue is important, the scenes with Polly were the emotional touchstone keeping everything together even as things changed.

*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book. 

Haunting and visceral, SORROWLAND is the story of a Black intersex teenage mother and her children after leaving a religious compound for the woods. It has a subtle kind of intensity where each passage is bearable, but any literal description of the plot tends toward a catalog of horrors. 

This book has such a beautiful way with language. The words weave and roll; mesmerizing whether describing turning a deer’s sinew into bowstring, the ever-changing wonder of Vern’s children growing up, or the strange and monstrous changes taking over her body. Since it is a horror story about a mother, I’ll clarify that her relationship with her children is not a source of horror. The way the children are described is full of love, exasperation, and endearment, usually in equal parts, wrapped in the tension between protectiveness and fostering their growing autonomy. It’s about a person fostering their own sense of agency as they care for someone else, as they have people to protect.

The worldbuilding inhabits a strange space where many relevant facets of US history are alluded to or perhaps even briefly described, but because one character or another is hearing of them for the first time, the narrative gives space and understanding to pull the reader in if they are similarly unfamiliar. In many ways the true horror is how little of the book requires the speculative elements in order to be terrifying, for often the mundane details are the most grotesque. 

The first two books had me thinking that this was just going to be a fae-based murder mystery series, and I was absolutely here for that, I was extremely excited. What book three gave me is something even better, and I hope that the series stays in the path that has been set for it by AN ARTIFICIAL NIGHT. The beginning of the series told me that the fae are capricious and scary and otherworldly. And, they showed me, they truly did, for I had no complaints about the nightmares that I found in the first two volumes. But this third book dragged me shaking through blood and candlewax and terror, and I wonder if it’ll ever let me go. 

I knew this story was on to something rather special when I was halfway through the book and the plot had just reached the point that I thought would have been the end of the story. But magic things come in threes and I ought to have remembered that. The thing that makes this book a turning point for the series and not just for the main character, is that it finally makes unavoidable the mind numbing, body horror, brain melting, bloody terror that is a faery in their own domain, and the cold trickle of fear at realizing that They can leave their lands and come Here. 

The fae have been in the human world in the other books, and the intersection of the mundane with the magical is at the heart of the series, but this is something dark and broken and uninvited that doesn’t know how to touch the world without breaking it even more. Something that has no desire to try, but instead delights in the torturous dark. Toby has had something of a death-wish until this point, it’s been remarked upon in the previous entries. but there’s a switch that needs to happen if you want to believe that your quasi-suicidal protagonist could keep going in a series that’s now up to book fourteen. Of course in book three the author wouldn’t know that much of the publishing future, but this necessary pivot is there that lets this future happen, executed so beautifully that I don’t want to spoil it, for there is a very specific change in Toby. Not that she suddenly switched to sunshine, flowers, and talking about how great life is or anything, for that would’ve been a different character rather than a transformed one, but there are some moments where she has to face the idea that her life might be better spent living than constantly looking for a heroic way to die. Toby’s relationships with various secondary characters are this beautiful slow burn moving throughout the series, this through-line, an emotional core that keeps me coming back. Not in a cliffhanger sense, but that it feels like they’re there in another room having these relationships and I want to see what happens. It’s why even though the plot of each book is pretty self contained thus far, to understand how her relationship with Tybalt or Mitch and Stacy, or Quentin or anyone at Shadowed Hills got to this point, you ought to read this whole series.

This doesn't quite wrap up anything left hanging from the previous book, but it continues development on several ongoing and fascinating interpersonal relationships that Toby has with various secondary characters. Almost the entire plot starts in this book and wasn't present in the last one, with several extremely major things introduced and resolved within this book. Like the last one, it doesn't really leave specific things to be addressed in the future, but the depth and slow-burning pace of the relationships in this series mean that even if I don't know what they'll do in the next book, I want to see these characters do something, anything, because it'll be fascinating to watch. The MC didn't change from the previous books, since the series is named for her I'd be surprised if she's ever not the main character, and her narrative voice is consistent with the previous books (though almost all of the casually ableist language which marred the previous books is absent here, which is a relief). As part of reading this long-running series I'm keeping track of the Major Things Which Are Present But Not Re-Explained, with the intention of tracking how easily a random reader could pick up this particular volume and have a good reading experience. As far as I can tell, everything you need to know in order to understand why people are there and why something is happening is explained, often startlingly succinctly, right as you need to know. The only thing I can think of is it doesn't explain how Sylvester came to be Toby's liege, but since it does explain that he is her liege and shows really well what that entails, I don't think a random reader would notice the missing explanation. Overall I think this would make sense if someone started with this book and didn't already know about the series, provided that this wasn't their introduction to Faerie. If it is, wow, this one is a lot, as I discussed earlier, and it's definitely a shocking introduction to the fae if this is how you first meet them. 

Tiny flickers of ableism remain this time around, and the idea of insanity is still very present when discussing the villain, but not to the degree of the last story. The villain, "Blind Michael" isn't scary because of his blindness, it didn't seem to me like it was played for grotesqueness. He's terrifying in ways that have nothing to do with his literal sight, or lack of it. He's also very literally not sane, not in the sense of having a specific mental illness, but that what he's doing is so far outside the bounds of human ideas of what is sane or reasonable that "insane" is the fastest way to describe it. I don't know if that's good, necessarily, and as much as I'm very happy to see a lot of the casually ableist language from earlier books go away, I don't know what it would take for terms like "insane" or "crazy" to naturally vanish from the series, given the unreality of faerie and how difficult it is for human-aligned minds to grasp. This time it definitely felt like "insane" was describing what he did, not why he did it, which was a welcome change from how the last book's antagonist was treated in the resolution.