PROMISE OF SHADOWS is a darkly fun story of a Harpy who escapes Tartarus to try and even the odds for everyone who isn't a light-filled god. 

The narrative style involves a lot of infodumping, but it's strategically placed throughout so that it's relevant information when the reader needs it, either the MC learning something or the MC conveying info to someone else. It’s hard to get away from that in a setting that uses Greek mythology, with a cast of characters so vast, ubiquitous, and fragmented in the modern understanding as to mean that readers will need to know which versions apply here, what twists are in play, and how the probably familiar terms and characters have been bent or played straight. There were a few point towards the end where it felt like the book had to pause and let us know why a significant thing was significant, which seemed to be a downside with this info-heavy style. Overall I like where this landed, it was very engaging and I had a great time. I especially love this version of harpies, that was my favorite piece of worldbuilding, followed closely by the way some roles like Oracle and Nyx are used. 

The relationships between the MC and her friends and allies form the emotional core of the book. She doesn't have to be the one doing everything, but there are some very pivotal things that only she can do, and how she handles that combination of helplessness and pressure drives the story. 

There was some random ableist language in a couple of places which was frustrating, but it's a minor problem in an otherwise fun book. 

WE ARE TOTALLY NORMAL meanders from party to party as Nandan tries to figure out what it means that he hooked up with his friend Dave and liked it. 

The MC is trying to figure out his sexuality, struggling to put words onto his feelings and to align those feelings with his actions. I appreciated that characters around him offer labels that might fit him but (with very few exceptions by characters the book doesn't like much anyway) don't try to keep labels on him. It offers the words in case the reader finds them resonant, but also allows the character to not be ready for that specificity quite yet.

This is very character driven, with the added layer that the MC is trying to figure out what to do to drive positive interactions between his friends/classmates at the seemingly endless stream of parties, hookups, and hangouts that is his high school experience. Only a couple of things really *happen* but the ways in which things almost happen, do happen, don't happen, or are assumed to have happened but the MC was totally wrong are absorbing and engaging. Short on plot, long on vibes, and full of heart, WE ARE TOTALLY NORMAL takes seriously how big everything feels in that last year of high school before official adult things start happening; knowing that things don't have to last forever in order to matter, but they also don't have to stop quite yet. 

THE LOST COAST is a sapphic story about grief, trust, and belonging, following a group of queer witches as they enlist a new girl's help to find their missing member who is somewhere near but achingly far away.

I love the way the narrative twists through time and shifts between point of view characters, it’s the feeling of being here but not here, a little bit lost but not all the way broken, that really captures the essence of the story. It’s messy and tangled and full of longing in all the best ways. Every chapter lists the point of view characters and the time frame, so it was pretty easy to follow even as those things kept changing, always coming back to now and back to Danny, as she is the central thread that holds the rest of it together even as she’s new to this place and these people.

The characterization is really great, I especially like how sometimes the “character” is “The Grays” as a group, Because sometimes the ways in which they are together are the point, and sometimes what matters is what each of them thinks separately, even when that isn’t always clear. especially early on when Danni isn’t yet one of The Grays, not quite part of the group, having these sections where they were a unit seeing her see them helps build that sense of separateness between Danny and The Grays so that later developments in the story feel like something coming together.

I have a LOT of questions about what the heck they'll do after this, but the ending feels good and definitely fits the story and the characters. It's not neat and tidy, their difficult problems have some complicated solutions and they'll have a lot to work out after this, but the story felt satisfying.

THE VAST AND BRUTAL SEA is a fitting end to The Vicious Deep trilogy, with a lot of care for the secondary and minor characters hurt by the roiling battles of the series. 

This is a pretty solid conclusion to the trilogy. It wraps up a bunch of stuff left over from the previous book, closing enough to answer the lingering questions but not so much as to make it feel like the characters end when the book does. It has a minor storyline that’s pretty contained to this book, but it’s very much part three of three, I don’t think it could stand alone and it’s not trying to. It definitely feels finished, it completes the quest that is the whole point of the trilogy. I love how it’s not afraid to make this small slice of time take three books to cover, it matches the series length to the stakes, rather than squishing it into one book. The MC is the same as the previous two books and feels consistent with them. This wouldn’t make a ton of sense without the other two books, there’s a lot of characters, a lot of moving pieces, and the stakes were clearly set up and then heightened in the first and second books, respectively, so I hope people read them first before trying this one.

I never really clicked with the narrator and I tended to find the secondary characters to be way more interesting than the MC. But that felt more like me just not clicking with him personally, not anything wrong with the book or the trilogy. The MC is well written, he learns and grows a lot, especially for such a short span of time; enough to feel like growth and not so much as to feel unrealistic. The characters around him have very complex lives that have nothing to do with him since they're all just pulled in by the power vacuum which spawned the whole contest, and I liked the books enough to read all three despite never quite warming up to the MC. Overall I'd say if you like the first two, the series is definitely worth finishing. I know this review is a little lukewarm, so I'd like to direct you over to one of the author's other series set in this same world, The Brooklyn Brujas (LABYRINTH LOST, BRUJA BORN, and WAYWARD WITCH), which I loved and can enthusiastically recommend.

I love what the ending does for the secondary characters, especially Kurt and Thalia. The MC is trying to fix a bunch of stuff that's been wrong for a long time, and does as much as he can with the power he's gained, it really feels like he listened to everyone throughout the trilogy, and while nothing can be perfect he did his best.

LIKE A LOVE STORY is about three teens trying to hang on to friendship and find love during the AIDS crisis, finding space for joy when the world wants so much for them to die. It's a messy story about imperfect people living through an especially terrible time to be gay*.

*I said "gay" not "queer" because the book seems to only know about gay men, more on that later.

I kept feeling jostled, uncomfortable when reading this, but mostly in a good way. The three MCs have very different perspectives, different assumptions about each other. One MC is fat and unabashedly loves food but deals with a lot of fatphobia and insecurity about how other people see her. I wish she'd had moments of food joy which weren't tainted by someone judging her in the moment, or her worrying about what other people were thinking. The gay and out MC deals with homophobia towards his gay identity and with the specter of what people around him think AIDS could mean, as well as what it actually means for his older gay friends who are dying of it. The gay and closeted MC (who is Persian) deals with racism and microaggressions about his background, and has internalized homophobia which means he’s both being hurt by other people’s homophobic reactions to the idea of gayness and turning that around into homophobic reactions towards other people because he doesn’t know what else to do. It makes for an emotionally complex but also sometimes exhausting read, as the white characters are racist, the straight characters are homophobic, and the thin characters are fatphobic. It’s set up to have no one be perfect, but it also means that early on there aren’t many emotional respites from the bigotry, though this did improve as the narrative progressed. 

The AIDS crisis and the gay men dying from AIDS are a prominent feature of the story, along with homophobic reactions to AIDS and the idea of it. The closeted MC is assumed to be straight when he’s actually gay, and no one considers for even a second the possibility that he could be bi (as far as I'm aware, "bi" was a label in use during the late eighties/early nineties but "pan" wasn't yet), anything that would make it feel like he has choices beyond “be in the closet and date the girl” or “be out and date the guy”. I don’t mean that he had to actually be bi or pan, just that no characters even consider that as a possibility. The idea that he could like both of the other MCs doesn’t occur to anyone, and it means his desire for other people is treated as the coveted object in a zero-sum game. I know this is set before the split attraction model was codified, but still, it’s so frustrating to see him do everything but scream “I’m homosexual and biromantic” and get rejected for so long for not being heterosexual (by the girl) and for not being strictly homoromantic (by the guy). My frustrations with the book were mostly about what wasn't quite in it but was a breath away, like the stark absence of queer women (who were also dying of AIDS in real life). There were two mentions of queer women in the entire book and neither of them seemed to acknowledge that AIDS affected them too. This didn't need to be everything, but since a lot of the narration made room for PSAs seemingly designed to make sure that it conveys a lot of the history of this very real epidemic which was ignored and mocked at the time, it stings to feel bi/pan erasure when reading. It also struggled in its handling of the fat character. She's... body-neutral, I guess? Her fatness seemed to exist mostly to have her have a "flaw" that isn't a flaw, just like being gay or being Iranian aren't flaws, but they can draw the ire of bigots when in homophobic and xenophobic settings.

I liked the second half better, maybe I just got used to the characters or maybe they'd gotten the frustrating love triangle stuff handled enough to let the story breathe a little more, since I'm not a huge fan of love triangles, especially ones built on miscommunications and lies. I cared a lot more about the way the friendships bend and whether or not they break. The epilogue was sad and jarring, I'm glad to know how the characters end up, but it was an appropriately bittersweet way to end this sad and hopeful story about people just trying to live and love.

A slowly-growing mystery and a sweetly anguished romance, TIMEKEEPER is perfect for anyone who wants some steampunk with their time-manipulation, the stuff of ancient deities in their veins. 

The characterization and worldbuilding are great, I like the ways it implies that the world is different from ours without the characters saying it outright (because of course they don’t have ours as a point of comparison. The particulars of the MCs position are more explained because the story really needs that, but things like “what would the existence of the clocktowers change about reality” are mainly implied. The blend of these is nice, I liked trying to puzzle out some of the changes but if you don’t want to devote that energy to scrutinizing the background details the story will still make sense. 

The romance is sweet, I especially like the moments when the MC figures out that something is playing out differently than he might expect because of who and what the love interest is. I love a good interstitial between chapters and the ones here were great, building up the shape of the world in ways that complemented the main story. There also were some heisty elements, and a fantastic sequence with time manipulation which was one of my favorite scenes in the whole book. 

 RESCUED BY THE MARRIED MONSTER HUNTERS is a bloody story with a lot of insect-adjacent body horror as the married monster hunters and the disguised monster work together to stop the other monsters and fall in love along the way. It's funny and visceral with excellent worldbuilding and really great characters. It was the chitinous slow-burn fighter romance I didn't know I needed but I'm very grateful to have read. While at times the descriptions of the dungeon setting was skirting the boundaries of what is or is not an infodump, the characterization was really subtle, letting me realize what different comments meant for characters identities as much as halfway through the book. The premise for how one is chosen to become a monster hunter was really cool, it makes me want another story set at one of the Cairns. All three MCs have distinct voices and it was easy to tell them apart. I love the dynamic between the married couple, and the careful way they relate to the third MC. 

Read this if "queer chitinous monster fucker dungeon crawl" sounds like a great time. 

*Update: I no longer recommend this book because the way that the trans character is discussed and misgendered appears to be part of a pattern of transphobia on the part of the author and not just an area where the characters could learn better in later books. For this reason I no longer recommend the book and I will not be reading the sequel. My original review is intact below.

ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE is a slow burn novel about friendship, loyalty, and growing up, following two teenage boys who are figuring out who they are and who they want to be. 

I truly loved reading this. Normally I have trouble getting into realistic fiction, but I was totally absorbed and spent all day curled up with this book. The MC’s struggle to figure out his feelings was given the space to breathe and develop, nothing felt rushed. The narrative covers more than two years (approximately ages 14 to 17) and he grows up a lot during that time. The secondary characters change too, in ways that make evident the changes they’re going through behind the scenes. It means that when things about how people around him did or did not communicate gradually change, they change because the topic came up and then time passed and a bunch of stuff happened and then they were in a different place emotionally and able to do something different when it came up again. That's like, a normal thing in real life, I know, but the way it's written here felt good. The ways his parents answer his questions (or don't) when he's younger versus when they see him as more mature felt like it fit them as characters as well as being information he could handle by the time he received it. There's so much great stuff with the MC's parents and his friend's parent that make it clear that they have lives beyond him, and the way the MC thinks about his parents as people changes as he gets older.

The dynamic between Ari (the MC) and Dante (his friend) was very relatable to me as someone who struggled as a teen and young adult with whether I knew anyone enough to say we were friends. They obviously are, but Ari spends a lot of the book not sure if they're really friends, then not quite able to make the leap to say "best friends", even after a pretty major incident where his actions spoke more than his words were able to. There are so many parts of their relationship where Dante is very sure and Ari lets the perfect be the enemy of the good and can't quite do or say something that feels so obvious to everyone else. 

Content note:

A background character who is never around in the actual story is in jail for the murder of a trans person. To me this was a disturbing but sadly realistic reason for someone to be absent due to incarceration, but please be aware that that's there. If I read any sequels I'll be on the lookout for how any possible redemption arc is handled for that character, as it has the potential to be additionally transphobic.

PET is about abuse and the shape of justice, because removing monsters requires vigilance. The MC has space to make the wrong decision sometimes and then figure out the aftermath without failure being catastrophic. She has a very strong sense of herself which helps ground the story as she's trying to figure out how to deal with the disturbing disruption to her life which is the main plot. The plot is about child abuse and how a community deals with abusers and enablers, but the text itself keeps most descriptions vague except for a few places where it's very important to be clear about what's going on. I like the way the "no monsters" setup is subverted and examined without making the narrator into a liar. Overall this is a short and cathartic book about communication and justice, with a vibrant MC and really great characterization of secondary and minor characters. 

This is a retelling which turns the foundational elements of Snow White (queen, girl, mirror, snow, huntsman, poison, love interest, etc.) into a story where they are recognizable but wholly transformed. The queen/stepmother has actual reasons to have a difficult relationship with her stepdaughter. The tension between the stepmother and stepdaughter is complex and understandable. Their respective fathers are important to the story and drive foundational elements of it but don't take over the story (except when parts of the narrative are about feelings of lost agency and someone else driving the story). The huntsman is well-placed with decent characterization without taking up too much room in a story that isn't really about him. The love interest is shown through the princess's eyes in way that was really endearing. I think someone could enjoy this story without knowing anything about prior versions, it takes the bones of the story but isn't trying to be referential once the reader is immersed in the tale.

I like the alternating narrators, it works really well here. Given that part of the story is about characters who feel misunderstood or dismissed by those around them I think it's especially important that both of them were able to tell their side to the reader. I especially love the gradual change within the two MCs as they shift from repeating what other people told them about themselves to figuring out what they actually want and what they actually think. It's gradual and very well executed.