Every Heart a Doorway is cold, strange, dark, beautiful, and deathly. If this is the start I can’t wait to see what the series goes on to be. I loved every second, I have the feeling that I've glimpsed my door, or one close enough that leaving it aches. 

The characters are vibrant and unique, and the premise of the worlds gives language to describe the variety in a general way even if we didn't learn every possible combination in this, the first book. It deftly handles what could have been a lot of heavy explanation with just enough to be a guidepost, a scaffold for future books. There’s a great balance between explaining the rules of the world, or at least the guidelines, while offering a taste of the myriad other places future stories might go. I love the plot, the writing, just all of it. The setting evokes the feeling of many of the weird and wonderful books I’ve loved before, but it stands on its own without relying on me to be nostalgic for other stories. Seanan’s writing consistently speaks to something in me, I’ve barely finished this world and I miss it already.

Unbirthday is crisp and strange; an excellent, gripping retelling of Alice in Wonderland. Drenched in red paint that slowly turns to blood as time runs out. A good balance of wit and whimsy with a lot of growing up.

Alice in Wonderland stories are at their best when the Alice is taking her lessons from Wonderland home to deal with the real world, and this carries that on very well. The real-world characters felt grounded, the Wonderlandians were whimsical, and Alice strives to work with the best of what the two worlds have to offer her. It brought up real-world issues that feel particularly resonant right now because they're the kind of problems that are (sadly) evergreen.

One of the little things I look for in any Wonderland retelling is how they'll handle the mirror moment, and this one was particularly good, I think it's my favorite scene in the whole book.

I loved this book. The original characters were great, the referential characters had flair consistent with the originals while carrying their essence into a whole new thing. Alice is closer to grown up and the whole thing has room to be a bit darker than before. Alice spends some time in her own world as well as Wonderland, and there’s a lovely premise connecting the two that was well-executed to bring in some of the macabre.

Retellings always have to choose what balance they’ll strike with the inspiration for their tale, and this unabashedly feels like part two of a story where part one was perhaps the original duology but more likely it was the version from Disney (which is quite appropriate for this particular series). I think it would be understandable to anyone unfamiliar with the source material, but your experience will definitely be improved if you have at least a passing familiarity with the story.

I'm still giddy about Witchmark. This book hits the ground running and shouts brusquely over one shoulder that the reader had best keep pace. I felt like a detective slowly discovering secrets; the world was complex and the characters were immediately fascinating. 

It's world-building by immersion with very few asides and explanations for the first third of the book. By the time it deigns to pause for backstory it's all details of a personal nature; political alignments and players in power. It assumes that the reader knows whatever someone growing up here would have been taught, but it casually drops in just enough explanation that I felt a sense of triumph every time some previously opaque bit of detail was clarified. 

Even when I didn't yet know where I was I knew why I cared. Though the explanations took a bit to arrive, the characters were great from the start. Miles was likable immediately, the main plot kicks off with a bang, er, with a person desperately in need of his help, and it was a really fun read. I have a bias towards liking the character, Robin, but everyone felt really engaging (even the ones I don't share a name with). Flipping through it I see some stuff in the early bits that I didn't know were actually important when I started and it makes me want to re-read this immediately to soak up more detail. 

The characterization is solid, there's a quaint understated-ness in certain areas which made it really feel like it maps on to a vaguely 1900's, quasi-British sensibility while still being its own thing. Those points of familiarity helped ground me as I got a sense of how this world describes itself, while gradually making it clear that this was truly some fantasy land as the book kept rolling. 

I loved the ending, I finished this book really happy about how everything ended up and very excited to read the next one.

Queen of the Conquered is a meditation on colonialism and complicity which doubles as a slow-burn murder mystery. It handles discussions of race and slavery in a fictional setting better than I could possibly summarize in this space. Just... go read this one.

I'm frankly stunned by this book. I spent 80% of the book confident that I understood everything at stake, everyone involved... then the last part of the book just blew me away. I wasn't precisely wrong about the pieces, just very wrong about which ones were important. And that, I think, is part of the point. Sigourney spends much of the book chasing a prize which the others in power seek to deny her based on the color of her skin, wielding her own power often against the enslaved people on the island. The book conveys this tension so well and so subtly that it floors me.

The characters are complex and vivid, even filtered through the myopic lens of Sigourney's assumptions about them as the POV character. Her attention (or lack of it) is carefully managed by the author, she's not an unreliable narrator, per-say, but she is torn between competing drives and old promises. The world-building is really good, there's a lot of language specific to this book, particularly describing social relationships on the islands, but its introduced at a pace that was easy to keep up with.

Ender's Game is more homophobic than I remembered, with antisemitism I'd never noticed, and a weird insistence on stating how clothed the child soldiers are at any time. The battles remain exhilarating and children are taken seriously, but the bigotry isn't worth it.

I’m not here to tell you that you can’t like this book. I used to, I loved this series, read it over and over (I’ve finished Children of the Mind at least thrice), but you need to know that it’s blisteringly homophobic and consistently has the message that no one in power will help a kid being bullied. It starts off pretty blatantly homophobic by calling the alien enemy “Buggers” and then keeps going from there. The way the kids bully each other reeks of homophobia and toxic masculinity. The adults are either useless or actively encouraging the kids to humiliate each other. Ender’s parents are portrayed as completely oblivious to how his older brother tortured him, and the adults when he’s in training are specifically described as being the real enemy.

There's a lot of bigotry and racism wrapped up in names and nicknames. We get Han Tzu's real name once before being told that he just goes by "Hot Soup". There's a very antisemitic digression surrounding the introduction of "Rose the Nose" which contains a slur I will not repeat here. A very antisemitic conspiracy theory in the real world is made canon in the world of the book (e.g. Jews simultaneously being in most positions of power but also able to be outsmarted by one clever non-Jew). I'm sure there was more stuff that I'm just missing the cultural context to pick up, but what I did notice this time around ranged from slightly cringy and insensitive to straight-up slurs. I understand that the protagonists are kids and that kids mimic what's around them, and I'm not shocked that a military environment bent on training and indoctrinating kids so they can save the planet from aliens maybe isn't super concerned about them calling each other names and using slurs as jokes. But the author made a choice to not call any of that out in the same chapters which otherwise contain something approaching an anti-bullying message. 

It has the message that kids are smart and brilliant and can handle the weight of the world if they have to, but it'll break them. When I was a kid I loved how it didn't talk down to me, how it got that I felt too old for my skin, like I knew too much for how adults saw me. It made me feel like a person while I was still a child. If you're in that space, I get it. I understand feeling seen and taken seriously by a book that doesn't talk down to you. But I don't recommend this one, the toxic messages aren't worth it. There's much better books that don't make homophobia casual, that don't treat antisemitism as logical and cool.

CW for murder, assault, homophobia, bullying, children in dangerous situations, body horror, religious suppression, torture, animal cruelty. 

Wayward Witch is about coming to terms with the past; fixing what you can and forgiving where you must. It continues the trilogy's emphasis on family while expanding all the wonderful things that can mean. Filled with fairies and a whole new realm to explore.

Bruja Born left me feeling like I needed to know more, and Wayward Witch gave me answers in a way I wasn't expecting. It would have been easy to give answers about Rose's dad in a way that pushed her to the side, but instead she really shines here and I love it. I like how this is a journey story like Labyrinth Lost while still being its own thing. Rose was in the previous two books and I really enjoyed her as the POV character for this one. She gave me a new person’s perspective on characters I already knew, plus a different way of thinking about the book’s world. She really got out of her siblings' shadows and had her own thing going on. I'd been wondering what her book would be like back when I read Bruja Born and enjoyed how Rose felt like a full person even though we hadn't gotten her side yet.

In any story where the protagonist is uncertain of their memory it can be difficult to portray memory gaps in a way that feels natural when reading. This book manages that balance splendidly. It’s subtle enough that I felt good when I first noticed it, like I’d caught this great bit of story by paying attention. I love the story, there’s a lot of characters but it stays pretty focused by making each one either really memorable and very important or okay to pay a little less attention to. There were several very moving and surprising moments, including one particularly great surprise towards the end that I loved.

The world-building really shines; it has a starting place from the previous two books, but rather than stay comfortably close to home it ventures out into a strange and wonderful place. I already knew the author is great at describing magical creatures (that was one of my favorite things in The Vicious Deep), but the fairies here are really amazing. I kept having a new favorite fairy every few chapters as subtle shifts in emphasis gave several of them time to stand out from the group. 

I'm sad for the trilogy to be over but I suspect there will keep being more in this world, I certainly hope I'm right.

Destiny is a good but stressful conclusion to an excellent trilogy. Many secrets are brought into the light, but not until after winding the tension for ~500 pages. Great characters; layered world-building; a good slow burn for fantasy-lovers. 

The story is great, it's well paced, and I love the characters (or have very specific, complex, and well-explained reasons to dislike them). I had enough of a rapport with them from the first two books to be very invested in this one, and that helped me get through the approximately 60% of the book where someone was missing very vital information. The characters continued to learn and grow from their appearances in the prior books and I'm very please with this as the conclusion of a trilogy. Enough things are settled to give a sense of a finality while being very clear that everyone is going to have a full life after this chapter of their story is over.

This was an incredibly stressful book for me to read because it is full of a specific trope that never fails to make me anxious: some combination of secrets and lies means that people are doing and saying things they wouldn't do if they had information they ought to have. It's the reason I generally can't watch sitcoms, as well as the reason I never finished watching the movie Ratatouille, and it made this book very difficult to read. The book is very aware of the needless anxiety and strife caused by this scenario, but that didn't make it much easier as an experience. The tropes were expertly wielded and given appropriate explanations, which didn't reduce my stress level much but I did appreciate that from a world-building perspective. I'm very glad I read it, and for anyone who has a similar anxiety I will reassure you now that it's given appropriate weight and then a very good resolution to the tension, but that tension is present for the majority of the text.

Destiny continues this trilogy's theme of bodily autonomy, how it is sometimes respected and other-times ignored. It grapples with themes of consent, personal agency, and mutual respect. Some very dark things happen in the book but it continually spares the reader the worst of that darkness. We are told about very traumatic things occurring without having to witness each excruciating detail because we are instead seeing the impact on the sufferer and those around them. When we are present for a traumatic event, it makes sense within the already dangerous world. I appreciate how this book doesn't make me feel like a voyeur of trauma, but instead impresses how terrible such things can be with precisely the level of detail necessary for the story and no more. It stands out that, in a book that deals with themes of consent and assault, the most stressful thing for me was how many lies and misdirections were happening. Much darker and more serious things were in play, but the book did not pin its tension and emotional weight on torturing the reader with that darkness.

The framing device is brought to its own conclusion here, it began in Rhapsody, continued in Prophecy, and is given a suitable ending in Destiny. We learn so much about a character who only appears in a scant handful of chapters and I love how deftly they were handled. As for the main story, I know there are more books in this world, but even if my rather large TBR pile never lets me get to them I can be very satisfied with where this trilogy ended up.

Book CWs for gaslighting, body horror, sexual assault.

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

Tales of Mundane Magic: Volume Three takes Gertie, Bridget, and their friends on a road trip, exploring even more fun magic stuff (plus some creepy things) as they deliver a very special macguffin. A little more grounded without taking things too seriously.

This book feels more mature than the previous volumes without it being jarring. It's less glib while still feeling very fun and adventurous. I know I previously said that Volume Two felt a bit more mature than Volume One, and I stand by that. I'm not sure whether Volume Three is more mature than both of them or if it just keeps the tone at the same level as Volume Two, but it happens so soon after Volume Two that either would be appropriate. The road trip setting is a nice way to make sure the series feels fresh after two volumes set at the same school, and it works wonderfully. 

The macguffin is nice, it didn't feel like a plot contrivance while I was reading and it's only as I try to describe its role without spoiling what it is that I realize it was a macguffin at all (which is a good sign for how well it fits). I'm enjoying Vivien's continued presence in the series, I think she's my favorite. More generally I like how everyone has a very distinct expertise or style of magic. It builds an ensemble of characters without anyone feeling gimmicky. I like how Faye and Gertie have specializations which are tied to collections of enchanted objects (charms and hats, respectively), as a plot device it allows for problems to be exactly as solvable as they need to be since we don't know all of what they have, but they have a lot of them. I know that was true in the previous volume, but it Faye really gets a chance to shine here in the way that Gertie did in the first two books.

I like the trend of having one or two pretty creepy stories, but mostly in a fridge-logic kind of way. If you think about them, the implications are terrifying, but if you stay at the level of the main narrative they're not unduly stressful. There's a kind of shrugging, a "well I guess this is a thing to figure out" attitude that is part of why these books can feel so light even when some darker things happen. It's a confidence, that between them all they'll figure it out. One big shift from the previous books is that here's it's clear that they're aware of at least some of the consequences if they fail, whereas in Volume One I wasn't sure if they realized what it could mean if things didn't work out.

Overall this is a great addition to the series, it's nice to have this group share a (mostly positive) bonding experience after the rather tense events at the end of the last book. My favorite story in the main sequence was at the rink, and I'm very exited for future developments off of the bonus story with Theodore.

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

Black Sun is fantastic and dark, slowly counting down to the fulfillment of an event years in the making. Full of complex relationships and a deep sense of history; interpersonal politics, religious factions, and the (hopeful) fulfillment of prophecy.

The sense of place is beautiful; the descriptions, especially early in the book, are so vivid that it felt like I could walk through many of the spaces in the text. I don’t normally have a good sense of space so it takes some damn good writing to take me there, but this did. The world-building implies complexity early on and then backs up that promise over and over without resorting to info-dumping. 

I love the dynamic between Xiala and Serapio, it builds really naturally and is part of some good Big Damn Moments; the kind that make me want to run around and tell everyone about the really awesome thing that just happened; the kind where an emotional arc combines with a spectacular Event in a way that is satisfying on all fronts. The book handles interpersonal relationships in general really well, no two people have the same dynamic with any other two, and that complexity builds to show different sides of people depending on who they're with. That's not unique to this book, but the subtlety of it here is remarkable and was one more thing I loved about it.

The pacing is really good, the timestamp at the beginning of each chapter was very useful and also ominous as it slowly counted down (except for brief forays into the past). It created tension for me as a reader without requiring the action to ramp up for every character (as not all of them had a sense of the deadline). 

The political and interpersonal machinations are great, they’re something I generally enjoy that is done really well here. There’s a few points where information is revealed to the reader via one POV character, but we only find out some part of its significance when a different character is made aware of it. It’s the kind of thing that makes the book feel cohesive even as it keep swapping POV characters with each new chapter. The characters have very relatable motives for their actions; generally I understood why the various factions were trying for different goals even though I wasn't rooting for everyone. The book also didn't really pressure me to feel like I need to root for anyone.

I loved the ending and I'm very ready for more in this series whenever it's available. 

I got 30% in and basically I'm just not in the mood for Jane Austen dragons right now. Whenever I am again I'd like to try and finish it.