The Savage Blue continues Tristan's quest from The Vicious Deep, stretching him to his limits as alliances shift and loyalties are complicated. How long can he stand between two worlds before he must sink or swim?

I like the MC a little better in this book than the first one, but I think that what I'm enjoying the most in this trilogy is the way that expectations and destiny are stretched and misconstrued. The fetch quest/competition feels like it connects a series of character moments as the MC tries to balance the competing interests of the people and creatures he cares about without controlling their lives. It deals with legacy and generational trauma and I like the turn the story takes in the midpoint of the trilogy. I know that stories dealing with oracles often have some version of "you were wrong the prophecy actually meant this", but I was genuinely surprised by this one and I'm looking forward to how the trilogy wraps up in the next book. If book one set up the world and expectations, this one is about what the MC and secondary characters decide to do with those constraints, whether they're going to lean into them, challenge them, or shatter them entirely. I continue to love the creatures, there were a few that were brand new and a lot that we met in the first book. The designs for the various oracles in particular are really great.

In my review of The Vicious deep I noted how the MC was kind of sexist in a way that felt realistic for a teenage boy, but that I hoped he’d learn to be less sexist as the trilogy progressed. There wasn’t really a big moment where he learns better or something, but I’m happy to report that a lot of the sexual focus on other people’s bodies went away in this book and it felt a lot better to read. He’s still a teenager in love and trying to figure out what he wants and with whom, but it feels like it’s more about the people. It does feel like character growth and not just a dropped personality trait, so I'm pretty pleased with how it's handled here.

Now for my usual book two check. This gives closure to a pretty big traumatic event from the first book in a way that has suitable gravitas without slowing the story down. I don't think it has a storyline which starts in this book but wasn't present in the first book. That's not a bad thing, but it means this is thoroughly part two of a longer story and can't really stand alone. There are some pretty big things left to be resolved in the third book and I'm excited to see how they turn out. I don't think this book would make sense if someone randomly picked it up and didn't know about the series. Again, it's book two of a trilogy, so that's fine, but it has a different feeling from, say, the author's later series in the same universe (Brooklyn Brujas) where you could pick up the second or third book and get 90% of what's happening. 

The Year Of The Witching ties together sexism, racism, and patriarchal religion into a dark and bloody horror story of a girl fighting to escape the constraints encircling her world since her birth. 

I have an active fear of childbirth and a general revulsion to portrayals of it. That means this won't be one I personally want to re-read, but if you don't have that aversion and you like horror, this book is fantastic (make sure to check the CWs). It takes a lot of elements common to cults and religious horror and turns them into a powerful personal story about engaging with legacy and standing against abusive systems. It never lets you forget that this is a horror novel, but there are stretches where the intensity abates to focus on quieter moments between characters. A lot of the horror is found in silence and complicity in the highly abusive system which dominates the MC's existence and guides most significant events in her life, while the high-stress moments are when she takes steps to challenge everything she's ever known. It rides a fine edge of discomfort, usually without becoming more than I could handle. 

I'm torn between wanting to re-read it and knowing that I'll have to be in a very calm space before I can handle reading it again, but horror fans should love it.

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

Social Media Central is a strange blend between a romance and a murder mystery, all in the middle of a dystopia predicated on people being "too online". 

This posits a dystopia that has all the flaws of a more online existence without any sense of the very real benefits. The premise didn’t have to be ableist, but the consistent grating insistence that anything online isn’t “real” and that everything ought to be done in person seemed to ignore they ways that people get left out when thing are impossible to do remotely. However, in the particular dystopia, the way that things are being done online instead of in person is described as having caused a lot of social damage because the reasons for going more online were broadly nefarious. I didn’t like it at first but I appreciate where it went with the premise, and I like most of the resolution.

One thing it does capture pretty accurately is how fickle online followings can be, then ramps that up as part of the dystopia. The main problem I have with the flow is it feels unbalanced. Early on we get all the reasons that massive groups of online followers can be extremely toxic, but smaller personal connections online are also portrayed as false. It turns out there’s a pretty good reason for the MC to feel that way within the book, but it was pretty frustrating to feel lectured for being online for the first half of the book, then grateful I don’t live in this particular megalomaniac’s dystopia for the second half.

The protagonist judges people for being too online and neglecting “real” relationships, but early on his constant drips of sexism and random body-shaming in his internal monologue make me think he’s definitely not as mature as he thinks he is. He thinks about various features of women’s bodies in what felt like very stereotypical cis/het/allo male thoughts from other books I’ve read, but when he’s thinking about men it feels so different and much less awkward. It feels like the author created a bisexual character by using how straight men talk about women, and how gay men feel about men. And, hey, that’s one way to get a character‘s thoughts, but since the thoughts about women are front-loaded in the text it was pretty off-putting because it made him feel like a sexist jerk who thinks he’s more authentic because his sexism is in person. I liked him a lot better in the second half when he figures out he also likes men and starts having romantic thoughts that don’t feel so objectifying. It's not character growth in terms of thinking about partners though, because even once he's knows he's bi his thoughts about women are just as objectifying (if less frequent, for plot reasons). I do appreciate that by the end he’s canonically bisexual, it isn’t portrayed as him switching from straight to gay.

Overall I like the second half a lot better than the first, and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes a murder mystery in the middle of their romantic dystopia. I don't think that's me, but I know you're out there somewhere.

Deadly and absorbing, Scythe by Neal Shusterman is about learning to wield death in a dystopia where everything else is managed by AI but gleaning still happens by hand. The best Scythes don't want the job.

This is a book about the people who deal out death once it can no longer be an accident and so it has a very high body count. People of all ages die (either in the page or implicitly between scenes), including children (sometimes temporarily, but often permanently). Some of the deaths are less detailed but several are very graphic. It's in the CWs but I need to make that very clear up front because if that's going to stress you out, then skip this one, it'll be fine. I love it, but it's possible that it has the highest body count of any non-war book I've read (if it's not the highest, it's close).

I came to this book already knowing I love Shusterman's writing and I was not disappointed here. It's a dystopian future full of characters who have trouble understanding our present but are left dealing with the remnants and rough edges that even the most advanced nanos and AI can't quite remove. The nastiest of these rough edges is the reality that if there are going to be more people and the planet is limited, some of them must die... and that's where the Scythes come in. The best dystopias highlight the strangeness and problems of our real world, and this handles that amazingly. The characters have distinct voices (which is crucial in a story with multiple narrators), and I was genuinely torn over which projected ending I wanted. What I received was immensely satisfying and should leave book two in a great position to continue the trilogy. The secondary characters who are Scythes have a nice balance between gravitas and humanity, and the normal humans sometimes get a chance to shine as well.

There's fatphobia baked into the book in a peculiar way, I think it's a critique of modern attitudes on weight, but it's in a grey zone that might make someone uncomfortable. Most people are a "desirable" weight due to nanos (part of fixing every problem except death), but there's a significant secondary character who chose to control their weight to be heavier on purpose and they get some fatphobic responses to it. I like how it's handled, and I'm glad that in a world where weight can be guided by pressing a dial it's explicit in the story that some people would still choose to have a body like mine, but the implied fatphobia of a world of artificially thin people might be stressful to some readers. I'll be looking to see how this is handled in the next two books, but how it's started is very good.

When trying to make sure that the audience knows how the new/futuristic setting is, but without having the characters awkwardly explain their reality, a great way is to subtly indicate which things they take for granted. This book had several great moments of that kind and they were spaced out in the book so that they built immersion in the story rather than taking me out of it. I'm looking forward to the rest of the trilogy, hopefully it'll take this fascinating premise to amazing places. 

A Line In The Dark is about relationships, secrets, and the ways that unvoiced tensions can bubble over until shouting feels like the only way to breach the silence. 

I was engrossed from beginning to end. The characterization is strong and there's just enough setting established to make it feel like I really knew a couple of spaces that were important to the plot without having to worry about how everything connected (there's more geographic detail I couldn't hold in my head, like some connecting streets, but the superfluous stuff wasn't overwhelming). It's a story that runs on interpersonal tensions and difficult-to-voice feelings between older teenagers, so you'll either love it or would just be better off skipping it. There's a difficult line to walk with the MC as an unreliable narrator, she's generally honest about what she thinks, but there's a level of denial running through the feelings she is able to voice which means that the audience knows why she says what she says, but some of the tension with the other characters is created by her inability to express herself. It creates a space where I was inclined to side with the MC, but we get enough information about the non-POV characters to completely understand where they're coming from and why they're reacting to her in any particular way. I'm normally very stressed out by stories where someone is lying to someone who is important to them about a major thing, but this didn't prompt that in me (or at least not in a bad way). Being able to get where everyone was coming from (and getting glimpses of the various levels of self-denial about certain things) helped mitigate that tension for me while still keeping the story very engaging.

I loved this one and the ending makes me want to re-read it so I can go through the whole story again now that I know how it wraps up. As soon as I finished I was flipping back through it to see different pieces recontexualized. I definitely recommend for anyone who wants a quick thriller which is driven by interpersonal tension. It's not full-on horror (and it's not trying to be), so it's great for people who want something tense but not extremely scary.

Punching The Air uses prose poetry and sparse illustrations to convey a small slice of how it feels to be accused and incarcerated. It is evocative and moving, often despairing and frequently beautiful. 

It was absorbing, sketching the edges of the broader systems of racism which funnel Black people specifically and people of color generally into prison. It delves into the details of how this could go for one person and has gone for many. It’s fiction that mirrors fact. It does something that isn’t quite world building, because it’s set now, but it’s world-illuminating, poking into the often-hidden corners of our unjust reality.

It’s filled with emotional swings, where the MC attempts to gain some stability, some moments of happiness, then something tears it down. It’s about cruelty without being a cruel book, it’s about racism and bitterness without being a bitter story. It handles a difficult story deftly and I’m in awe.

Not Your Sidekick is a fun and light-hearted dystopian superhero story which stays fairly upbeat even in a world that feels insidious and dips into horrific when viewed from the outside. 

It slowly trickles in bits of information that paint the picture of how warped and controlling the world is. The MC doesn't know to question it (of course, at first how would she?), but the little drips of stuff that's off-kilter and probably toxic comes in slowly. The story stays in a very light tone even though some darker stuff is implied to be going on. Her journey to figure out what's happening and decide what she wants to do about it was really cool, and I'd definitely recommend this to readers in the middle-range of YA (14-15 probably as the sweet spot). 

There's a couple of conversational moments that felt like they were designed to let someone know why pronouns are important. I'm really hyped that a book for teens has this in here because it's really important. As an adult reader who already knows about pronoun etiquette it just took me out of the moment a bit, but I know if I'd gotten to read this as a teen it might have been a step in figuring out some stuff a little sooner. 

The action is great, the characters are endearing and awkward in their own ways and I loved reading this book. I'm very excited to check out the sequels, this laid a lot of groundwork in terms of worldbuilding and I'm interested to see how the author develops it further. The biggest points of anxiety for me as a reader all revolved around a certain character being chronically unable to pick up a hint when it was handed DIRECTLY to her, but it was really relatable (hence the anxiety).

Finna is a fun and fast-paced (slightly deadly) anti-capitalist adventure through a wormhole in technically-not-Ikea with two former lovers a few days after breaking up. 

It’s an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-transphobic, anti-capitalist, thought-provoking romp which strikes just the right balance between explaining stressful stuff and depicting an escape from it. The romantic relationship is over before the story starts, and it helps convey a raw feeling, an uncertainty, because while the reader doesn’t already know all of why it didn’t work out, the shape is familiar. The world-building is really good for such a short book. 

I did not finish Ship of Smoke and Steel, I got 110 pages in and had to stop because I had a weird mix between apathy and dread every time I thought about it. This one just never gripped me, I think I had trouble relating to a MC who treats allies as so completely disposable. If they’re not going to care about the secondary characters, why should I? Even this early on there is a hint of possible queer romance that will develop later on in the book, but since the protagonist has already demonstrated that they are completely capable of

murdering men they've been in relationships with

, being offered a f/f pairing doesn't sit right with me. As a bi person, having a character who seems to be written as bi or pan also be a character willing to

murder their partners

is really unsettling because it plays into biphobic stereotypes. If the book handles it by making her have been lesbian and not really bi or pan... that would make it worse, not better because it would play off of a different facet of biphobia. I didn't get far enough to know which way it was going to go, but I got far enough to know that I wouldn't be comfortable with either solution.

Discount Armageddon is an exciting and pretty bloody way to kick off a series, and I love it. With a few twists I guessed and one that I definitely did not see coming, this fun and fast-paced story that has me excited to keep reading this series.

The cryptids described and/or referenced in the book are from a variety of cultures and appear to be interpretations which came out of a lot of research and care, though I’m unable to vouch specifically for any of the portrayals. The overall effect is to make it clear from the start of the series that cryptids are a worldwide phenomenon, with cryptids from cultures all over the world (no default-European nonsense here). There’s a pretty important secondary character whose journey involves learning to be less racist against cryptids, and occasionally he dips into microaggressions founded in real-world racism. It’s minor, and it’s called out by the other characters, but it is there.

Overall I really enjoyed this one. Having read some of the author's later (and better) writing spoils me a bit for this one because I know it gets so much better later, but I really like this book and it's a great start to a series that I've heard so many good things about. I love creature-features and that's the focus of this whole book so I was very happy reading it.