A Spell for Chameleon attempts to be a fantasy about appearances, assumptions, history, and the importance of treating people fairly. Unfortunately it is so agonizingly sexist that it can barely go ten pages without insulting women or upholding toxic masculinity.

I used to love this series, and I’d read up as far as A Swell Foop before stopping. But now that I’m mostly out of the toxic, sexist miasma of my childhood and teen years, the problems in this book are apparent from the first page. Bink has everything (telling us he’s smart, good looking, amazing in every way), except for a finger he lost in a childhood incident made worse by internalized toxic masculinity and fear making him hide the damage until it was too late to be fixed by magic, and his apparent lack of magic in a world which demands that one’s magical talent appear by age 25. The world built here is fascinating, which is a large part of why I read so many of these books as a teenager. But it’s conveyed in long infodumps and meandering internal monologues. There’s a genuinely intriguing story here, and if it had been about someone learning to be less sexist, unlearning internalized toxic behaviors, then it could be great. But it’s someone who’s canonically amazing except for one thing (apparent lack of magic) who’s trying to get that one last thing to go right.

There’s a very uncomfortable fixation with sex, including sexual assault. There are ways to handle this topic well, and not every way this book tries is bad, but it’s constant and occasionally treated like a plot twist. There’s a point early on where the crime of rape is described as being almost a serious as being a human without magic, which is a terrible way to convey the seriousness of both situations. It’s also obsessed with intelligence, especially as an indication of merit. In order to have a narrative which tackles a topic, like sexism, it helps a great deal to have at least one character who isn’t modeling that problematic behavior. That’s not the only thing you need, but it’s a pretty important first step. In this book, some of the female characters are differently sexist than the male ones, but they’re all participating in misogyny and rape culture in a way that expects men to behave badly and for women to exist primarily as sex objects. It has little things that show they’re uncomfortable with being discussed as objects of desire, but it’s repeatedly framed as then shying away from raw manliness, rather than the (in my opinion, much more likely) possibility that they don’t like feeling as though only men restraining their “natural impulses” keeps them safe from assault or worse.

There are some genuinely funny moments and clearly a lot of thought went into how Xanth works, its history and its denizens. The writing is good throughout and the plot is handled really well, for the most part. If it didn’t have casual and sometimes not-so-casual misogyny every other page this would be a great book, and I get why someone might like it anyway (I used to, myself). It has some interesting ideas about perception and appearances and how the official story might not be the real story. I liked the second half much better than the first, since a lot of the sexist world building was out of the way and I could relax into the story a little. But then, every couple if pages there would be an event or a comment that pulled me back out, making me remember how sexist this book is. And, the frustrating thing is, it had the potential to be an examination of those toxic ideas, but instead it features people mutually reinforcing different kinds of sexism, occasionally objecting to the way another person performs their sexist attitudes, but never questioning their rightness. There’s a bit where a male character expresses a pretty sexist idea and a female character snaps at him, “You’re not a woman”, thus implying that the author at least knows what female objections to sexism can look like, which is part of why it’s so frustrating that the book sets up the reader to much more easily identify with the mostly calm and more often reasonable male characters. In that scene, she objects, then the characters just move on to the next scene like nothing happened. It sets it up like it’s just natural for everything to be this way, but the author is the one who set this up, who recreated sexism from the real world and added in a few unique dynamics only possible in a fantasy setting. Every time I thought, for a minute, that maybe the book would teach a lesson to the sexist characters, it would disappoint me by reaffirming their troubling behavior. So-called “manly” behavior is consistently equated with sexist behavior. The author had the ability to write anything here, Xanth is a really cool magical land (especially early on before the mythos became self-contradicting), and he interwove it with sexist garbage. 

Cemetery Boys is one of my most gloriously happy things I've read in a long while. It delights in its spookiness, celebrating life while giving enough space to mourn when needed. I just want to hug them all, reading this book feels like being part of their joy.

I love everything about this book. I needed to read something positive right now and this took my breath away with how reassuring and celebratory it is. The MCs are working through some very tough things (one of them is a ghost, after all) but they build each other up in a way that has this wonderful oscillation where they're almost never sad at the same time and they keep helping each other and making things better. It's the right amount of spooky, extremely affirming

And that's before the ending, the truly amazing ending that I won't spoil, I don't dare. It just wraps up everything so perfectly in a way that fits with everything that came before while still blowing me away.

Usually when I'm reading a book that comes so highly recommended there will be some moment, some turning point where something clicks and I understand what's so wonderful, why everyone's talking about it at a level beyond just being written well. In this book that happened more than once, first early on as I was getting into the book, then again towards the end (that fantastic ending). The characters are great, with distinct narrative voices and solid personalities; I love the plot, it felt like I knew what was going on, what the goals were, and where the story was taking me, while still having room to be surprised in great ways; and the setting is sketched in way that gives me a feeling of how the spaces are connected to each other without bogging the story down in exact geographic detail.

Upright Women Wanted is a hopeful story about finding people like us in unexpected but wonderful places. The best parts of a western in the gaps of the post-apocalypse set against the specter of a vague forever-war. A scrappy novella with a big heart.

I know I love most things I read, but I needed something happy right now and this was just the ticket. It's about people in the gaps, the spaces between what's supposed to happen and the edge of the next set of rules, the next scrutinizing town. It takes the wildness and danger of a Western and gives it a modern framing with a post-apocalyptic flair. Some of the backstories are either implicitly or explicitly filled with some terrible events, but it strikes a balance between showing and telling that leaves the really bad stuff to the imagination. It has a fair amount of blood and death for such an ultimately hopeful book, but the ending was so cathartic and lovely, just what I needed right now.

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

Each Of Us A Desert is a story of responsibility, freedom, love, and the strictures of power, told via a desperate journey across an unforgiving desert to a destination which keeps shifting to remain just out of reach. 

The structure of the journey in this book is really good. It feels open without being aimless, they have places they're trying to go and things they need to do or find there, but part of the point seems to be that what they're looking for keeps being just out of reach, or not quite what they thought it would be. The ending is amazing, it brought everything together in a way that surprised me while also completely fitting the story. The characters are great, the prose is beautiful, and I love the way that we travel through various towns with different ways of handling something which is deeply personal to the main character in a way that, by the end, changes the way they think about it. I don't understand Spanish, but the way it was interwoven with the English meant I had enough context to get the feeling of what was being said even if I don't know the translation. 

I love everything this book was doing, but it was a difficult read for me because I’m terrified of vomit. The MC (for great and very interesting plot reasons) spends a long stretch in the book occasionally throwing up and consistently thinking about how she’s trying not to throw up. If you have a phobia of that very particular thing (as I do) then please be careful. It’s handled with care and there isn’t much of a description in each instance, but it’s very clear that that’s what’s happening and so it stressed me out. If you don’t have that specific phobia then you’ll probably be fine, this just happens to be a major thing for me and it affected how much I could handle reading at a time.

Overall this is fantastic, and if you don't have my particular hangup you should be fine (just check the CWs first). It felt different from anything else I've read and I definitely recommend it.

The Raven Tower is a fantasy succession struggle murder mystery, where part of the mystery lies in whether there was truly a murder. An immersive setting and slightly disconcerting second person narration create a tale of gods, the price of power, twisted language, and loyalty.

The story was interesting but mostly fine, but, for me at least, the real strength in this book is in how it slowly revealed what the story actually was, like a tide slowly going out. Most of the pieces were technically in place early on, but the way their importance is revealed creates a slow-burning mystery with a pretty dramatic finale. The world-building is great, the interpersonal relationships are complex in a good way without being too much to keep track of. It felt calm and meditative to read, prompting a lot of interesting thoughts about the nature of language and communication in a practical way (which I quite enjoyed).

This was good but disconcerting for me personally, especially in the early part of the book. A large portion of it is written in second person, and the character addressed in this manner is male, which caused some trouble since my pronouns are they/them (not he/him). After I adjusted to it and felt less like I was being personally being addressed with incorrect pronouns it was fine, but that took at least fifty pages. The narrative decision to use a mix of first and second person results in a book that is narrated from a single point of view while following two main characters. Overall I think I like it, it works very well for this story. Both main characters are very different and I like them a lot. The tropes that were put together to create the characters are ones I've seen before, some of them many times, but something about the way they come together to make them (especially the non-human ones) feel fresh, As much as I like the POV character, I think Myriad is the one I'd most like to meet (followed closely by Eolo).

Come Tumbling Down carries our adventurers through death, darkness, and drowning, reckoning with a legacy of blood and lightning. Sometimes being a hero means coming to terms with what it means to be a monster. 

I don't know if this is the darkest book so far, but I think it's the bleakest (in a very good way). It feels like the characters are going to the depths of something and while they'll probably come back, it feels just uncertain enough to be worrying, and no matter what they'll be changed. There are limits to what can happen to the kids in this series, but death is absolutely on the table (and some of them have died previously). We're told that the Moors run on lightning but I wonder if Jillian would say they run on blood.  

Doing a quick check-in on how this works as a sequel in a long-running series: It wraps up some major things left hanging from the previous books, looking like it closed off a big arc (in a very satisfying way). It has a complete story that begins and ends just within this volume in a way that would be understandable if you haven't read any of the other books in the series. This has a feel of a series that's going to be very long and episodic while also carrying some arcs between books, and all of that is carried off very well here. While some major things end here, there's still so much more to explore in these worlds and I'm very excited for more. Finally, there are a lot of different characters and they all have very distinct ways of communicating and thinking about what's happening,  I now have a sense of how several of them would react to different situations. I especially enjoyed Christopher's reaction to the Moors and how they're different from Mariposa. The relationships, whether platonic or romantic, are complex and feel very real. They all feel distinct and it seems like every interaction was used to the utmost to show off more of the children as they try to make things be a little less broken.

The pacing was very slow and I was creeped out by the age gap in a romance where one person was a minor. I love queer books and thought the movie was okay, but this just felt off.