DNF at 25%
It’s sweet and cute and the plot hinges on a relationship trope that stresses me out to the point that I basically can’t watch any sitcoms ever. It’s not right for me. 

Blazewrath Games is the story of a teenager trying to fulfill her lifelong dream of playing a particular magical sport, now disillusioned when it turns out to have much more sinister origins but she has to play anyway.

I really like the sport centered in this book. It makes sense as something you could really play in human/dragon teams, and it’s suitable epic-feeling to make a major tournament of in a world with magic. I wish we’d gotten more of it, because, unfortunately, this book really didn’t click with me, I could never quite get into the style, but it has a lot of strengths and I want to highlight those for anyone who doesn’t have tastes identical to mine (so... most people). 

It has an explanatory style which makes sure to clarify a lot of stuff that could be confusing when left as subtext. Often something will happen, the MC reacts, then they think about what just happened in a way that makes its importance explicit. The backstory of the world is really complicated and so it does help to clarify what's going on, but for me it repeatedly broke my immersion because it reinforced the fact that I'm not in that world and I don't know the backstory. I prefer stories which move on and assume I'll keep up. This explanatory style is clearly a deliberate choice from the author, and it's used consistently throughout the book, so if that's what you like then this is a pretty good version of it. 

A lot of the action scenes feel like they’re written for people who don’t care about action scenes (or who don't need any help to picture them on their own). They’re written to convey vaguely what happened, and they do a great job of capturing the emotion behind them, but they only occasionally describe individual moves within the fights. I don't picture things in my head very well, so if I don't get a full description it feels like the scene didn't happen, but people who either don't need to "see" it or who can with just a little prompting will probably do fine. The big action scenes at the very end had more description than the earlier ones, but even there it skipped over a lot of details I would have liked.

I liked the second half a lot better than the first, at least in terms of style, because enough things had been explained by that point for the narration to relax and for the MC to no longer constantly stop to explain every thing to us. For anyone who likes that explanatory style, it’s still there, just every 5-10 pages instead of 1-2. The infodumps never quit though, even at the end there were places where the MC stopped to explain a major story element or over-explain the implications of what someone else just said.

Now for the aspects I didn’t like at all. I constantly felt jerked around as a reader. Because of the way backstory is handled, I’d be told something was important at the same time I learned it even was a factor in something. Occasionally there were “revelations” or epiphanies which were discarded as unimportant by the MC when she’d barely finished hyping how awesome they were. I felt like I was being dragged by someone solving a maze at top speed by running into all the walls until they got out. I never had a chance to figure out something myself, or to experience a slow revelation from clues earlier in the story. I just watched the MC race through the possibilities until the book ended. I don’t need to be led along, I enjoy some mystery, and I don’t normally mind being confused, but it felt like the story couldn’t decide between being clear and being mysterious, and the result was, for me at least, the worst of both worlds. It also manages to be a book about dragons which spends most of the book not having dragons in the major scenes. Even the training montage is largely centered on hand-to-hand fighting and intra-team drama instead of the dragons. That’s not all bad, but it meant that in addition to not feeling great about the story I also didn’t get much of what was, for me, the main draw to the story in the first place. I would feel misled if someone pitched this book to me as any version of “a worldwide competition of a sport with dragons”, because that’s only technically true. The focus is much more on the machinations behind the scenes which are affecting the games.

The ending was fine, it works, there was yet another revelation at the end in a way that explained some confusing things from earlier, but not enough to change my general opinion. If you're interested from what I've said then go for it, you might like it. 

Beloved begins as a slow-burning and haunting story about living on after the worst days, slowing winding around how to tell those days without shattering again.

The story rotates narrators and jumps back and forth in time in a way that was a little confusing at first, but the narrators have distinct voices and there’s mostly just Now and one big past event for each narrator as far as jumping around in time is concerned, so it became pretty easy to keep track of where the story was. The lack of demarcation with each switch helped to build the feeling that the past isn’t really gone for any of them. The story is about reckoning with the past in different ways, and how they deal with it. It’s also a ghost story, a haunting of the past refusing to leave. As the story develops it begins depicting the past events which were just hinted at earlier, circling back to them from different perspectives and catching slightly different bits of time surrounding a few very pivotal moments. It had the effect of helping me to ease into a very traumatic story.

The middle third of the book (leading up to the end of part 1) is absolutely devastating, enough story threads are in place for it to slowly wind to a set of riveting and horrifying explanations. This book is also filled with care, for the characters and the readers. The most brutal events are told from the perspective of someone who has already survived them (or who we know is around later on, at least), and that makes the current events feel manageable even when they’re differently awful. There are multiple narrators but it usually wasn’t hard to figure out whose perspective was in each section because their narrative styles were different enough to be distinct while having enough in common for the changes in POV to not be jarring.

I like the ending, it feels like it meets the characters at a place that makes sense for everything they've been through, both before the book began and during the main timeline. They're not all the way better, not by a long shot, but they're working on it, each in their own way.

I did not finish Collected Ghost Stories, I made it four stories in (just shy of 50 pages). 

I love the cadence of writing from the late 19th and early 20th century, but that's the only thing I liked about this, and that wasn't enough for me to keep going. Contemporary racist and ableist ideas about what is scary played a part a couple of the stories I read (e.g.: casually invoking “gipsies” as being blamed for a child’s disappearance but not actually responsible for it; describing an apparition as dark, sub-human, and low-intelligence based on appearance alone, etc.). 

I was disappointed by the endings of the first several stories, they end with the mystery being explained, usually by a narrator, then that’s it. No resolution, nothing. Just the explanation of the event and it ends. My understanding is that the later stories get a bit better, but for me it wasn't worth pushing through. If you want to know what a late-19th/early-20th century white professor wrote as ghost stories, then it's fine for that, but I wouldn't pick this up if I want to read something scary. A couple of the concepts are really cool (a tree full of giant spiders that grows where a woman burned as a witch was buried is a neat story idea), but the actual stories weren't very engaging (even when they weren't actively racist).

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

Daimonion is a viscerally creepy with extra viscera (also insects, spiders... swarms in general). It backs up the body horror with interesting MCs and a horrific twist on several mythologies. 

I’ve never been quite so grateful to be unbothered by horror related to insects and spiders, because there's a lot of it in here. The horror (arthropod-related or not) is well-handled and genuinely creepy. It felt like the author had a good sense of what traumatic events to show, and what was best left as backstory, especially in the context of horror. The rotating POV characters helped to keep the story moving even when someone was doing something potentially boring (like being in a coccoon unable to move for several days). The backstory involves a lot of bad stuff happening to people, including kids, for a very long time before the book starts and in the time jump between the introduction and the main story, so please take care of yourselves and check the CWs before starting this one.

The way the grander arc of the series is balanced with the needs of this particular volume was so great. I was very immersed in the story, began realizing that there was too much I needed to know and not enough book left, then was pleasantly surprised by how the last few chapters found that perfect stopping point. There's a lot of untapped stuff here for the series to expand on, but most of the main things driving the plot in this volume are settled, one way or another. In particular I like the way that the last part of the book contextualized the significance of things which we knew already, transforming them from their introduction as things the characters needed to deal with or work around just in this story, into bits of a much larger mythos that we don't have the full shape of yet, but I'm very intrigued. This particular blend of mythology and horror has a lot of different directions it could go, but all of them seem good from here. 

Reverie is a queer fantasy about the futility of escapism, using dreams larger than life to create a space for becoming comfortable in one's own skin after the Reverie is over. 

This one took me a bit to get into because I felt out of step with the plot from the outset. The MC also doesn’t know what happened right before the book started, so the reader is discovering the past along with him. The pacing is kind of wonky and disjointed, for the first half of the book I never really felt like I had a handle on what the next event was going to be. That sense of unease, of never quite getting comfortable, is thematically appropriate and helps reinforce the sense that things are confusing and wrong, even outside the Reveries. Towards the end of the book the pacing started feeling better as the MC was starting to understand more of what had happened before and was happening now. We stay very centered on the MC's perspective, including his uncertainty and his frequent mistrust of the people around him because he can't trust his memory and doesn't know why his supposed friends are behaving the way they do. 

The constant feeling that things are subtly wrong is explicitly and implicitly driven by the ways that queer people are made to feel uncomfortable for existing, by worries of not being accepted for being gay, by a past of repeatedly being bullied for being read as gay, etc. It deals with the way that homophobia takes a toll over the course of years, rather than in quick and easily recognizable instances like slurs. It’s really well done, perhaps a bit obvious in places but I suspect that’s because I’m also queer and so as soon as there was a hint of it I picked up on the parallels immediately. This would probably work really well for a teenage reader (this is YA, after all), as it lays the groundwork for the comparison and then slowly makes it more and more explicit as the MC becomes more confident and gets a better handle on what’s going on and what he can do to fix things. 

It's kind of about queer escapism, but it's more about how escapism doesn't fix things, running (especially metaphorically) doesn't make things better and eventually you have to face them, process them, and find a way forwards. I really love the last quarter of the book, it pulled everything together and the ending is fantastic. The romance is sweet without taking up too much of the story, but queer love and acceptance are bound up in the structure of this book in a way that is not separable from it. This is perfect for when you're ready to feel off-kilter, a little bit uncomfortable but not in a really traumatic way (at least for the reader). 

The Art of Saving The World is an artful subversion of the "big damn hero", taking someone exquisitely ordinary and doubling (quintupling?) down on her to great effect. 

In this book, there’s a literal capricious and mostly-powerful but extremely mysterious force putting constraints on the MC’s movements. Which force you think I mean will likely change throughout the text, as there are several contenders for the title. The story has a lot of uncertainty built into it: the MC is a pretty reliable narrator, but there are a lot of factions who are actively lying to her which means that at several key points she discovers information which recontextualizes earlier events. I think it's handled well and I enjoy that kind of twist, so I had a good time. I like the balance between introspection and action. The story really embraced the idea of "hurry up and wait" which fit the kind of crisis being solved and gave space to breathe between action pieces. 

This feels like it encapsulates the reasons sci-fi and fantasy are often placed together as a genre, for by blending the two you can get awesome results which would be difficult to obtain by staying strictly within one of the two genres. This does lean a bit more towards fantasy in terms of how the MC approached the challenges, but the government people were acting like this was definitely a sci-fi story and that disconnect in approach helped to naturally drive some of the tension. I like the setting and most of the characters, but I loved the dynamic between the MC and her copies. She had a different rapport with each of them and we get glimpses of they having different interpersonal relationships and levels of comfort with each other, all of which combined to make them feel like their own characters even when they could have had personalities as identical as their general appearance.

I have mixed feelings about the way that the ending subverted the "big damn hero" tropes, but most of that stems from my being a person who generally needs closure. The ending has this open sense on purpose, conveying that there's more life to live and I like that idea in theory but can't quite convince my anxiety that it's good in practice. One place where the subversion worked really well was towards the middle of the story when we find out that someone isn't happy with how the MC is handling things, and it aligned neatly with my then-complaint that it felt like a lot of the story was happening near her without her being the one to take charge. This clearly was on purpose, so that eased some of my frustration and I was able to enjoy the narrative arc more. I agree that this ending was the best outcome, but there was an unsettling anticlimax in the execution. Again, there's a lot of genre subversion going on so that sense of anticlimax was probably on purpose, but I remain unsettled. I'm a person who needs obvious closure, so if that's not an issue for you then you'll probably be fine.

Confessions of the Fox explores longing and desire, juggling visceral descriptions with contemplations of various theoretical frameworks in an informative and evocative blend.  

The “Editor’s Note” is part of the story, don’t skip it (it’s not very long). The way the footnotes weave through the story creates some artful and subtle shifts in tone and pacing, with pauses created by reading some bit of the meta-story before returning to the main narrative. The text plays with desire and euphoria and it’s so beautiful; euphoria from simple happiness, joy from sex, bliss from finally feeling right in one’s skin by way of craft, mastery, or gender expression. The counterpoint to this desire is longing; waiting for those golden moments when everything just fits, and taking measures to make that happiness more permanent, more stable. The narrator’s understanding of the text is filled with longing and tempered with discontent, balanced so it’s not quite the same emotional note as the main text (that would be too neat), but something complimentary and frequently wry. It’s also a narrative of heists, escapes, and close calls, an exhilarating tale which was wholly absorbing. 

After a heartfelt and contemplative Editor’s note, Confessions of the Fox starts out with some delightfully antiquated erotic descriptions by way of describing The Fox’s crimes. This book weaves sexual and/or erotic content into every chapter and most scenes, in such a way that anyone who will be uncomfortable with frequent coy and not so coy references to anatomy and discussions of sex and sexual desire would be better to skip this one. But if all that sounds great to you, this book is amazing and I hope you‘ll love it as much as I do. This is apparently a somewhere between historical fiction and a retelling of a folk tale about a probably real person, I didn't come to this knowing any of that and still enjoyed it immensely. It's grounded enough to be completely comprehensible without any of that background knowledge, and I love how it turned out. The characterization is excellent, even secondary characters who only exist as references in the footnotes feel like they have an appropriate level of presence and vivacity. The perspective and contemplation by the Narrator in the footnotes balances the rawness of the MC. 

The Awakened Kingdom is a novella set after the end of The Inheritance Trilogy, featuring a tonal shift and a new MC. 

This is a sequel novella which is not meant to stand on its own. The story is self-contained but so much of the background was established during the main trilogy that this story doesn't devote much time to showing the setting, except in the ways where things have changed in the centuries since the end of the trilogy. It's a mostly lighthearted story about grief, which feels weird to say. The MC is disconnected from the very sad events of the main trilogy's conclusion, and finds herself in the position of being surrounded by people who expect things from her based on someone she never knew. How she deals with that is interesting and I enjoyed this story. I am glad that this particular narrative tone is only present as a novella because I think it might become irritating in a longer story, but it's just the right amount here to really convey her state of mind (being a literal child but also a godling).

The secondary plot which becomes more obvious in the second half of the story is really intriguing, it continues some of the themes from the main trilogy in a great way. I especially like the continuation of the idea that unchecked power isn't great in anyone's hands, no matter how noble the foundation. 

If you like The Inheritance Trilogy and want to know more about what happened after the main story, give this a read. However, if you read this first it might not be a great way to know whether you'll like the main trilogy since the tone is pretty different.