A SONG FOR QUIET feels good to read, the prose and syllabic cadence drips through my brain like a song I know I like but couldn't quite catch. It has a numb and distant feeling, as the MC begins filled with grief over death that happened before the scene starts, and then never quite gets a chance to catch his breath until the end. It describes how music feels to the characters, intertwined with death and darkness, implying the way it sounds to those who have beautiful ways to describe harsh melodies.

This was a quick and fun read, I like it a lot. The MCs are a great mix between stubborn and oblivious, getting both of their perspectives helps things from getting too stressful when miscommunications happen because we quickly hear the other person's side on the event, even if the effects take most of the book to resolve. It does touch on some stressful topics, but the characters gradually work through their issues in ways that felt good to read. The dynamics with the two families were very different and were well-placed in the book. They were very present without being distracting. 

I like the way the films they watch and the one Rachel is making have just enough detail to highlight how they matter to the story, but without making the book be really about any of those films. It's focused on the romance of these very stubborn characters who should just kiss already, and then what happens when they actually do. If you love Gilmore Girls, but wanted Rory to date Paris, you will love this book. It’s definitely its own thing, but the dedication references Rory and Paris so I’m very confident that the parallels are intentional. I think the best friend was a little under-utilized but the story really isn't about him so it's not a big deal, just don't expect him to be the stand-in for Lane.

Overall this was a fun and cathartic romance, with just enough space for things to be bad before they get better.

 DNF 9% in. The main premise and first chapter stressed me out too much. Contemporary books are very hit-or-miss for me and I didn't like anything the character in the very first chapter did. 

THE SEEP is about pain, loss, grief, and the necessity of leaving space for sadness. The MC is trying to process her personal grief in a world which continually blunts the edges of pain and often totally erases sadness via the aliens which infect them. She fights to keep the messy parts of herself and doesn't understand why almost everyone else is content to lose that roughness. Her journey has a lot of messy stages which I don't want to spoil because part of the point of the story is that living through the moments without knowing how it'll end or if everything will be okay is important, and everyone needs the space to decide what they want, the freedom to make bad choices and learn from them.

Most of this book is aftercare and processing loss, and after reading it I feel sad but okay. It's a good kind of sad, and I really like the emotional arc of the book.

GIRL, SERPENT, THORN is a queer story about monstrosity and beauty, full of secrets and longing for what's just out of reach.

This book was absorbing, totally compelling. The style is simple and clear like a great fairy tale, but the characters have depth and feel so vibrant within the easy prose. I like the premise (girl has a curse where she can't touch anyone or they'll die), and the way the nuances of that premise are explored throughout the book was great. It could easily have been a series of people and things she can't touch, but it goes somewhere much more interesting and I like it a lot. One of its strengths is the way the antagonists show a lot of nuance and depth while also being believable as friends or potential romantic interests. How the narrative shifts to change who is thought of as a hero and a villain throughout the story was really good.

This first part of the book was a bit frustrating for me because I spent the first half wishing that the characters could just talk to each other instead of not saying things and then having everything go badly because of a lack of communication. The justifications for why certain things were kept secret felt like it boiled down to "if they talk to each other the plot won't happen, shhhhhhhh stop asking". I liked the second half a lot better, partly because the secrets starting coming out and communication got a lot freer. I love the ending, it lands in a place that feels like real growth for the MC and secondary characters. It fits the story without undercutting the earlier struggles. Overall the story arc makes sense and it needed to establish the frustration of living with all these secrets in order for there to be any tension when they slowly get revealed and resolved, but it did make this a book where I wanted to just stick the characters in a room and make them have a conversation, or several. Eventually those conversations do happen, to be clear. I just get stressed out by this kind of tension in general.

The pace at the start of the book is so fast it was almost dizzying, like running while crying and laughing. I got a good sense of who the MC is and her dynamic with her brother, and I liked how the worldbuilding stopped just shy of infodumping by making a bunch of things happen so they could narrate to the reader as they ran. It’s genre-savvy and pretty self-aware, knowing how ridiculous everything looks doesn’t lessen the stakes when they’re often life-or-death. It’s a fun kind of darkness, the kind that “futuristic Arthurian retelling in spaaaaaace” invokes, one with queens, cosplay, corporations, kinship, spaceships, magic, and quests. It introduces more serious and tragic elements lightly at first, later returning to them to dwell in their plot significance, then doubles down in the second half of the book as things go from “frustrating but maybe solvable” to “a lot of people have died and more people will die if we don't fix this”. 

The way Merlin kept thinking or talking about where characters fit in the cycle was helpful, especially early on, since I have a little familiarity with the Arthurian canon but not enough to know where all the players fit in a retelling unless the narrative gives me some help. It also grounded his perspective on them, establishing him as much as it introduced them. 

The main frustrating thing for me was that a character comes out as ace in a "we could have avoided all this tragedy if you'd ever asked anything about me" way, and it made it feel like their identity was a plot point to help misdirect other drama. The other queer rep in the book felt really good and the whole thing adds up to an almost entirely queer cast with just the canon rep, so having that character's identity only come up one time to explain someone else's issue was disappointing.

This is part one of a longer saga, and it does a good job of setting up who these versions of the characters are. The ending is a "to be continued" situation, but enough of this volume's plot wrapped up for me to be satisfied. I'll definitely be checking out the sequel, this is a cool and weird world and I want to know where it goes next.

KING OF THE RISING concludes the story begun in QUEEN OF THE CONQUERED, following a secondary character from the first book while the previous main character stays on in the background. The current MC is one of a small group leading the islanders' revolution against their former masters. There are even more murders and a lot of mystery when compared to the first book, but this one isn't a "murder mystery" in the same way. I'm glad of that, because instead this is a slow burn, nail-biting, tense narrative without the need to try and be a whodunnit when they're literally in the middle of a war. Now, as for what this is: KING OF THE RISING follows the islanders as they turn a night of rebellion into a war for their freedom and the freedom of the Islands. The MC frequently travels to get food and fighters, returning to their island base of operations as morale dwindles and tensions rise. 
A lot of the narrative feels bleak and inevitable. I don't think I could have believed an attempt at a happier story, given what was established in the first book. The infighting and tensions feel realistic, and I liked the political wrangling. QUEEN OF THE CONQUERED felt like the MC didn't have room to think beyond her own ambitions, and that misguided focus helped set  up the events in KING OF THE RISING. Here, the MC is focused on trying to save as many people as possible. Rather than have a narrow focus, he's spread too thin, wanting to be a hero but also not wanting anything to go wrong, even though things will and they can't all make it even if they win (which isn't guaranteed). Some of this contrast is explicit in the text, especially when the current and former MC's disagree (which is pretty often). I like this MC a lot better as a person, but they're both great characters. It feels like part of the point is that this isn't the first rebellion and it won't be the last, but it matters. Every bit matters.

Time for the sequel check. This wraps up a lot of things left hanging from the previous book. It has at least one storyline unique to this book, I'm thinking specifically of the attempts to raise guards and the MC's rivalry with a fellow leader in the rebellion. There are things introduced and resolved within this book, but it's definitely part two of a two-part story. As the second book in a duology it wraps up a lot of things and feels very finished. I don't really know what could happen from here if at some point it were turned into a trilogy (though it could be nice to read more books set in these islands, I don't know if I'll be ready for this level of sadness again for a while). The MC is different from the first book and they feel very different in their actions and their motivations, as well as pretty distinct in their narrative voices. Finally, this could mostly stand on its own since it does a pretty good job of getting the reader up to speed without infodumping but it'll make way more sense if you read the first book first.

I feel sad and contemplative, mostly. It's a bleak story of desperate circumstances and a lot of sad endings. It's also worth it. If you've read QUEEN OF THE CONQUERED please pick this up and get the second half of the story. 

With the caveat that books where a relationship is the main plot stress me out... I really like this one. It didn't linger too long on the bad stuff, whenever things were rough emotionally in one part of the MC's life she always had at least one other place to turn for support (though sometimes more than one thing was rocky at once). Her relationship with her best friends (who are engaged to each other) is nuanced and dynamic, she has a different rapport with them as individuals and as a couple. It also deals with her family relationships, with her much older siblings and her parents who have very strong opinions about what she should do with her life. The main romantic interest in the story gets space for the reader to get to know him pretty well as the MC is trying to figure out what she wants as a biromantic asexual person who isn't out to many people and has a lot of anxiety about talking about her asexuality. This book has nuanced discussions of labels which stay centered on the MC throughout, focused on her experience without trying to overgeneralize for other people who might share her labels. The MC and the love interest also have some discussions about their very different experiences as POC (Black and Japanese, respectively). Overall it's a mostly upbeat story that's not afraid to be sad when it's needed, and is a firm proponent of the restorative powers of great food and a good cry. The layers of important relationships in the MC's life helped to showcase different parts of her inner life as well as showing what she cares about with each person. 

THE LEGEND OF THE GOLDEN RAVEN is queer longing and an epic legend, riding on feelings until the end, bound for beauty or for bitterness, who can say? This is a companion story to THE WICKER KING and should be read after the main novel by those who want Jack’s perspective. Due to the, uh, entire main plot of THE WICKER KING, read this second or you’ll get random spoilers. This is a sequel/midquel novella so I’ll do my usual sequel check. Since it takes place during the events of the first book it doesn't really wrap anything up, but it does give emotional closure for things from the first book. Jack's perspective on the exact same events is so different from August's that it feels like a completely different story in a lot of ways, in addition to literally telling another story within the story, so I think it does have storyline which starts here and wasn't really shown previously, but that's up for debate. It can't stand on its own, it is explicitly part of a larger saga. The MC is different in this one and it's a very different narrative voice from the MC in THE WICKER KING. Finally, this wouldn't make a lot of sense without THE WICKER KING, but it's also not trying to be on its own so that's not a problem. If you’ve read THE WICKER KING, you should read this because it’s wonderful to get Jack’s perspective. If you haven’t read THE WICKER KING, go do that for achillean slow burn longing with best friends trying to help each other even though reality is uncertain and stories are all that’s keeping them going most days... then come back and read this.

Dimensional travel is possible, but only if your doppelganger is dead. The MC travels to a world where her double was recently murdered, and the plot gets going in earnest from there. I was pleasantly surprised by how deliberate the pacing is, it doesn't rush to get us to that very important journey. Instead we linger in the setup, getting to know the hub world and at least one other before she goes to the plot-important one for the first time.

The MC is mostly a reliable narrator, but when she travels she can be very wrong about what’s happening in a particular world. This is used to its full advantage, creating subversion and surprise as she discovers mistakes in her assumptions and the new possibilities opened by those gaps. The plot which I thought would take the whole book to tell turned out to just be the first half before twisting all that was set up before to tell an even more interesting story. I would have been content with the story I thought I was getting, but I love what it turned out to be. This even included two of my favorite things: heists and interpersonal politics. So much of this book is built on understanding people, cultures, and how shifts in either between worlds change what can and cannot be done, what words to use, and how things will go down once they’re in motion.

The world-building (heh) is really good! It focuses on two main places and then gradually describes them by talking about how things (and people) are the same or different in the parallel worlds. It creates a feeling where every description of the background or a character is there for a reason. Would we normally care that this house is white? Maybe, maybe not, but if it’s a different color on most worlds and this time that indicates something important because of the knock-on effects of changes like [pick whatever spoiler you want], that makes it feel like the details matter. And, hey, even if you won’t remember what that house color was it still did its job and informed the world. This could have been and info-dumping nightmare of a book and instead it uses everything to make the worlds feel significant with its focus. It keeps the number of frequently referenced worlds low enough for the important ones to be memorable, but also giving little tidbits about ones we won’t actually get to see. I love parallel worlds and time travel stories and this was fantastic. The number of secondary characters whose variants I had to track was mercifully short, letting me enjoy the machinations without getting confused about which versions did or said which thing. 

The backstory (and, increasingly, the main story) is chock-full of trauma, for the MC and most of the secondary characters as well. Check the CWs, because the book’s MC is dead on over 370 worlds and we find out many of the common reasons. It’s a steady drip of sometimes horrific details that fit the story and matter to current events, but none of the worlds are kind to children, and many of them were especially rough on the MC. It’s a great premise, and I appreciate how the book uses it to comment on the classism and racism inherent in a system which requires people who are dead elsewhere, which means they’re probably not privileged in the main world either. Little details like that are used really well throughout the book and I loved every minute of it.