After any great and dramatic heroic gesture comes the aftermath, the fallout, the nitty gritty of picking up the pieces of a shattered world, sorting through the detritus of a broken system. Stormsong sits in that discomfort, finding just how much has broken.

The events of Witchmark revealed the rot which underlay their comforts and conveniences, and Stormsong sees them reckon with the messy nature of moving towards justice. Shifting MCs from the first book allows for focus on a different angle. Where Witchmark began as a mystery story then became embroiled in politics, Stormsong starts with the practical and political consequences of the events in the first book, then rapidly transforms into a mystery... of how to deal with those events and also solve a murder. The story was engaging, the characters were great, and the romance was a tender mix of implicit and overt that really worked for me. It's sweet without being cloying. I thought it was going to be more of a political thriller than a detective story, and for the first third it is, but then it turns and becomes this excellent mix of both in a way that reveals there were mystery elements all along. 

This story is deeply concerned with the multifaceted ramifications of what it means to not just stop current atrocities but to bring a reckoning; to break what must be broken and build anew. There was a scene with some political machinations that I was really excited about (and it remains a fantastic scene), but there's an event later on which re-contextualizes it. It's not that the narrator is unreliable, exactly, but she definitely has a perspective that makes her less aware of certain issues, especially early on. However the author definitely was aware, and there are events later in the book which challenge her understanding of certain events. It was a really good portrayal of someone partway through restructuring their worldview, then needing to adjust even more.

As for my usual check whenever I read book two of a trilogy, this is a great entry. It establishes characters well enough to make sense just within this story in case someone missed the first one, but does it in several clever ways to make the plot recaps feel natural. Grace is consistent with her characterization from the first book (where she wasn’t the MC), but her perspective in this book feels pretty complete, and her voice is distinct from Miles, the previous MC. Some events left over from the previous book are settled, there’s a full storyline that fits just within this book, and also there’s a pretty major element left to be handled in the final book. Overall this is a great book and an excellent midpoint to the trilogy.

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

Power Inversion artfully pivots from Erin's despairing introspection in Power Surge to an interdimensional struggle to save everything and everyone they love, hopefully without losing too much of theirself in the process. Sometimes you just feel like a monster.

This book felt more fractured and surreal than the first one, at least partly due to the complicated mess of stuff the MC is trying to handle. Erin is conflicted within themself, trying to deal with revelations of family secrets, fear of their own identity, and disturbing visions of the future. The pace steadily ramps up as the characters stop getting real chances to rest because the apocalypse pauses for no one. This creates a dynamic where there are no background problems, merely ones that are shoved to the side for just a moment in order to focus one something more urgent before everything crashes back in all at once. There are a few small lulls, tiny retreats to regroup but they never quite get a break. 

I’m a big fan of world-building through chapter header quotes and I especially like the ones here. They help reinforce the sense of legacy and a fight that has spanned generations while also being positioned to hint at information that will become more explicitly stated in the narrative as the current characters figure things out.

The battles work really well, I like the blend of high-fantasy magic with a sci-fi shape that Erin brings to everything they do. It makes Erin feel like a real person who would have grown up with iconography from popular culture, so of course that affects the way they think about their newly discovered powers. It's a good choice for a series set in very specific calendar years in the real world. Erin's dreams tell them just enough to get some dangerously good ideas without giving away the plot to the reader.

The relationships feel more settled, more developed than in Power Surge. José and Erin have to handle some pretty momentous news early in the book, but they're able to handle it a lot better than either of them could have in the first book. It sets the tone for how they tackle the rest of the events, and it works really well overall. Erin still doesn't value their own life highly, but they're a little better at seeing how much they matter to other people, and more willing to show how much they care about the people in their life. Erin and Mel get to a much better phase of their relationship, but it's hard sometimes to be friends with your family, and they have a lot of baggage to get through before they can totally feel settled.

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

Among The Beasts & Briars is for anyone who wants the undead in their fairy tale, some complexity in their fantasy monarchy; who dreams of saplings taking root in their blood. A little bit of romance, facing of fears, running in terror. 

I was engrossed from the first page: the initial descriptions were evocative; the past tragedy is teased just long enough to be intriguing but not so long as to feel like something important was being hidden or ignored. There's a whole lot of world built very quickly and it's very evocative. This has the feeling of a fairy tale from the first line and I love it.

The friendship between Cerys/Daisy and Fox feels tender and genuine, it shows the little things that add up to being a complex but overall great rapport. They share the narration pretty evenly and the handoffs between perspectives feel natural, like it's time for the other one for a bit before switching back. The way Fox is handled felt really good. He’s aware of how he’s changed and he isn’t instantly okay with it. The dysmorphia he experiences can map onto a variety of real-world experiences but the sense of wrongness he describes felt very familiar to me. Now, whether you like the resolution will depend a great deal on what kind of catharsis you’re looking for. For this story, not trying to be an analog for anything, the resolution is amazing, I love everything about it. It fits the characters, it fits the plot, it makes sense and I love what it did. If you’re very invested in one outcome or another for Fox, I don’t know if you’re in the half who will be elated or disappointed.

The story feels very complete, and while I definitely want to find more by this author I'm very content with the time spent here. I think it's just the right amount of attention and emphasis for this narrative. 

Family is fraught and friendships are complicated, especially when you're a gumiho. Wicked Fox is a romance with bite; negotiating with the past for the possibility of a future. A bit of mystery just might hurt someone after all.

It feels very high stakes but also languid at the same time. There's a time limit, a ticking clock for them to figure out a solution and work together, but also the time is long enough that a lot happens while they wait for it to run out. The romance is awkward and endearing, Jihoon’s earnestness is a great counterpoint to Miyoung’s standoffishness. There's a lot of negotiation of boundaries, both in healthy and not-so-healthy ways. It felt very earnest and messy, but good. I like that Jihoon has important people in his life, there's a lot of value placed on friends and family in a way that's positive and supportive. It makes for a great contrast with Miyoung, but without making it so stark that one of them has everything and the other has nothing. 

I appreciate a good interstitial narration between chapters, and this example was very satisfying. I enjoyed these as an alternative to getting infodumps of the mythology from either of the gumiho. As for the pacing of the book as a whole, I was thinking of this book as kind of languid after a very dramatic opening, and I thought I knew where it was going. I successfully guessed one twist and then was almost immediately surprised by several additional layers that made a bunch of slightly confusing things from earlier click into place all at once. I like the twists and I love the ending. It was a really sweet conclusion as the first book in a series and I'm intrigued by the prospect of where it might go next.

There's a strange calm in already knowing how a story ends. In An Absent Dream is filled with sadness and wonder, too-clever bargains and barely-survived scrapes. Lessons of friendship, loss, fair value, and the weight of promises. Welcome to the Goblin Market. 

This focuses on someone whom we met earlier in the series as far as the reader is concerned, but in her own timeline she is barely getting started. This creates a sense of tragedy and wonder all tangled together as we slowly learn the reason for the bargain waiting in the end of the story. The pacing is very well handled, skipping what would only bog the story down, lingering on her indecision just enough to make the reader understand what would drive here to her eventual choice. I love Moon's wildness contrasting Lundy's steady attention and determination. 

The story is great, I like this version of the Goblin Market and it has the nebulous mix of rules and capriciousness that makes the setting feel otherworldly, which is perfect for this series. There was a moment partway through where I was torn between rooting for success and failure because both options seemed to have a terrible cost. The slow unfolding of rules helped convey how much Lundy was growing up, it helps to keep the reader from getting an info-dump while still making sure the character knows what she ought.

A Dream So Dark is a fast-moving and bloody sequel, swiftly cycling through heroes as they barely dare to rest; trying to save Wonderland and rescue their friends. More Nightmares and darkness; the anguish of fighting former friends and the joy of making new ones. 

I loved this book, I had a great time reading it, and I'm currently giddy over some very cool stuff that was revealed and something I think I figured out (but I won't know if I'm right until the third book). I continue to enjoy Alice, she really comes into her own here, figuring out how to be strong in a way that fits her. I like how the stuff with her mom is handled, that tension was a very stressful part of the first book and I think it works out in a way that makes sense for everyone, giving the characters what they need without feeling like it was resolved just for the sake of the plot.

I'm still over the moon about Addison; in the first book I loved him as a new version of the Mad Hatter (my favorite Alice in Wonderland character) and in this one I love him as himself, every dark-backstoried, trying-to-do-the-right-thing, finding-new-joy bit of him. 

Since this is the second book in what looks like it will just be a trilogy I'm doing my usual check to see how well this works, both on its own and as book two of three. I look to see whether the story gets to finish any plot threads from the first book, whether it starts any of its own to be resolved later, and whether it feels solid enough as a story to have its own narrative arc. Sometimes a book two can be great without these things, but if a story ever feels incomplete it's usually because on of those pieces is missing. I'm very happy with this book on all three fronts. There are some problems which were known in the first book and resolved at different stages of this one, a really good arc that fits mostly within this volume, and some stuff that had better be resolved in the third one because I'm on the edge of my seat. I was left with a great blend between closure and anticipation, and I'm enjoying it.

The battles felt good to read, with a nice blend between describing the literal moves and the mental/emotional struggle between the fighters. As for world-building, we get some new characters in the mundane world and some really fantastic people and places in Wonderland. It made Wonderland feel more solid, like it's a place where someone might actually live and not just somewhere Alice visits to fight Nightmares. I'm very excited to find out what the third book will bring.

Anger Is A Gift begins as a romance in the middle of a terrible situation and shifts into depicting personal and communal rage at racism (systemic and specific) and police brutality as that situation is escalated by the school under the excuse of protection and safety

It begins with new happiness in the midst of living on after trauma and then slowly veers into (fully justified and well-portrayed) anger and rage because systemic racism and police brutality don't pause. Because there's a significant change in the tone partway through, I'm going to talk about the book as two distinct sections.

Early on the newly budding romance is tender and light, hesitant but heartfelt in a way that came up off the page. The dynamic between Moss and Javier was really cute and I loved all their scenes together. Moss has a lot of friends, and it can be tough to convey distinct personalities for everyone very quickly but this handled that really well. Just in case anyone read this and felt that it was unrealistic for so many kinds of queer kids to be hanging out together, please know that's really common, and often happens even if none of us know we're queer at the time. It made me really happy to see this group of kids who figured out enough early enough to get to be themselves with their peers while still in school. There's also a lot of discussion about the problems at the school, problems that have been going on for years and just keep getting worse due to various kinds of systemic racism, the most immediate of which is a lack of funding. 

Partway through the book turns due to a change of policy at the school which permanently injures at least one student. The shift in tone felt more like a change in emphasis at first, as it became apparent that this wasn't just a romance in the midst of unjust events, but actually a book about that situation and those events. The escalation from there was really well handled as a story. This is the part where it doesn't say right to say I loved specific bits of the plot, because I didn't love them and I wasn't supposed to. They're terrible events and the book doesn't give a solution for them, but that was the whole point. It conveyed helplessness and rage at injustice, both systemic and specific. 

Book CWs for racism, police brutality, murder, descriptions and depictions of police tactics during a protest.

Ender's Shadow takes a minor (but memorable) character from Ender's Game and fills out his story in a cool way. Unfortunately it did so by ramping up ableism until it is inextricable from the premise, the plot, and two of the main characters.

Review CW for quoting ableist language from the text. 

For those of you who still like this series, I understand why, I used to love it too. When I first discovered this series I actually read Ender's Shadow before I read Ender's Game. I read it over and over because I needed something in it. Something that understood how much adult pressure I was under while still a child, how much I felt too old for my skin while being expected to be brilliant. There's a lot of ways that this book speaks to kids who, for whatever reason, are pushed to grow up too quickly. The writing is pretty good and the main character is complex (but the narrative does a bit more "tell" than "show", often explaining very complex thought processes rather than doing something with them). For a long time there's little focus on other kids in the school because, frankly, Bean is mainly interested in just one kid, Ender, only really making a friend with anyone late in the story. By contrast, Ender's Game is full of complex interactions with the other kids because Ender is a very different child from Bean.

Because this takes place during approximately the same time as Ender's Game and spends much of it in the same location with the same people, it had the challenge of not contradicting what came before but also bringing new things to the same story. In that, it does a good job. In between writing Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, the author seems to have learned that perhaps it wasn't a good idea to fill the pages with a homophobic slur and constantly identify everyone by stereotypes about their countries or nicknames based on being unable to say their real names properly, so instead of constantly saying "Buggers" we have adults gently "reminding" each other that their enemies are more properly called the "Formics", and there's a conversation where a minor character with a bad nickname tells Bean that he doesn't want anyone using that name anymore. 

As much as I loved them once, I won't recommend this book or the series ever again. Just as much of the language and plot in Ender's Game was inextricable from homophobia, this book and its ableism can't be separated without the whole thing coming down. The main antagonist to Bean is Achilles, named because of some unspecified deformity in one of his legs. He is driven to destroy anyone who has seen him in a position of weakness. And... yeah that's his motivation. He begins life disabled in an environment where weakness will get you killed, manages to survive, but hates anyone who looks down on him for any reason, including but not limited to thinking of him as subordinate or unable to do something. But even that "disabled villain" trope isn't the main ableism here. We find out about halfway through the book that a certain character only exists because someone was inspired by the existence autistic people, described in the text as "idiot savants", to experiment on embryos to try and unlock savant levels of intelligence (or greater, if possible). When describing the inspiration for the experiment the book repeats a string of harmful (and untrue) stereotypes about autistic people and uses slurs I will not repeat here. While the person describing this experiment is cast as a kind of villain, his theories are understood to be correct and he's only reviled for carrying them out. This is a story about adults exploiting children, built on several kinds of ableism, and as much as I loved this book before I understood how harmful it was, I don't recommend it. If you missed this bit of the sci-fi canon you don't need to go back for it.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones is calm and dark, unafraid of gore; more interested in the slow transformation of two people distorted by ill-fitting molds, suddenly released to find very different paths with new kinds of darkness, surety settling in their bones.

This was a (relatively) calm way to learn more of a very strange and haunting story that was briefly described in Every Heart a Doorway. I'd been intrigued by Jack and Jill and I loved this opportunity to learn more about them. There's a lot of care here, for the characters and the audience. At several points the unnamed narrator tells us that a particular very bad thing happens, and trusts us to manage our own imaginations as to whether we'd like to dwell on gory details. Certain kinds of darkness are left unsaid, while others are dragged into the light, given no shadows in which to hide.

It's a horrific tale, darker somehow for the feeling of creeping inevitability granted by knowing how it ends before it's begun. It's about the journey when we already know the destination, and I treasure the path this pulled me along. If you were comfortable with the kind of darkness and horror in the first book then you'll likely be fine with this one. It feels like slowly probing the edges of a certain level of grim atmosphere and familiarity with death, turning over tiny pieces of something shattered and exhaling slowly when it's as bad as you thought, but no worse; you already knew it had broken.

The City We Became fits a lot of sff into a place big enough to handle it. I loved the boroughs as people and the conclusion left me wanting more. It makes NYC feel ordinary and epic at the same time; a glimpse of how much someone loves this place I've never seen. 

I don't have great sense of place or home but this book made me feel how much someone can care for a space, for a city. I loved that experience, this book felt really good to read. The characters are vibrant and distinct from one another, and I was really engaged with the story once it got going. As I neared the end, though, I kept checking to see if there were really that few pages left. This is book one of a trilogy, and some really cool things happen in the resolution of this part of the story, but my main complaint is that book two isn't here already. 

As for pacing, it starts out kind of slow; there's a lot of characters to introduce and so when the large cast was combined with an air of mystery (for some of them) it took me a little bit to get into it. I connected with one of them right away and then used that to slowly get the whole picture. At least part of that feeling is I've never been to New York, and so when some of the initial characterization is built on how much different characters embody parts of the city it meant I was learning the boroughs and the people instead of just learning new characters. That being said, I read the last 60% of the book in an afternoon, once I got into it I didn't want to put it down. Books don't have to create that urgency in order to be good, but I like how this one pulled me in. 

I feel very invested in this world and I definitely want to know what happens next. This is a story that needs to be continued, so it's very good that it's the start of a trilogy.