Subtle and Powerful, The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco wields undeath and beauty to great effect. Tea of the Embers tells her history to the Bard on a lonely and bone-strewn beach, one of great magic; silk and swords; danger, dance, and betrayal.

The Heartsrunes feel at once ingenious and obvious, like someone pointed out a thing I ought to have known forever but never dreamed of before. They're essential to the book without ever feeling like a storytelling shortcut, and the color system was understandable. Tea is believable at different levels of maturity throughout the whole book, she changes a lot and it comes through really well. Her dynamic with Fox feels like a real sibling relationship, their peculiar complication notwithstanding. 

There’s a tension and release created by the interstitial sections of the framing device, sometimes warning of emotional beats to come, sometimes cooling down after a stressful chapter. It made for a very soothing reading experience for me, one that addresses the kind of anxiety I have when reading new books that involve a character making social faux pas. It allowed for tiny wind-ups, building a small bit of tension by revealing some information in the interstitial then having it pay off somewhere in the next chapter (or even several chapters later). It's all the comfort of knowing how a book is going to turn out, without actually spoiling the end. The interstitials are complete enough to be their own short story and they strengthen the book overall, separate from being a good fit for my own reading quirks.

Overall I love this book and I'm very excited to read the sequel. I keep trying to describe more things I liked and I'm stymied by the spoilery nature of most of them.

A Blade So Black uses Wonderland to magically embody community trauma and personal grief. Moving beyond a simple retelling, it is referential instead of a replication. It is the terror of a Nightmare made flesh with blades strong enough to fight it.

When adapting or re-interpreting well-known source material like the collection of books and poems by Lewis Carroll which are often known collectively as "Alice in Wonderland", it can be difficult to find a balance between leveraging that background knowledge and building a new understanding of that world. I love adaptations of this world in particular, and I love how this version turned out. The characters are referential rather than just copying the source material, the history and current state of Wonderland are explained sufficiently for readers who might be unfamiliar with the original (or who are perhaps more familiar with some of the famous adaptations), and overall I think it lands correctly in this balance of inspiration, homage, and new stories.

This book is deeply steeped in grief and mourning. It wasn't depressing or stressful to read, generally, but part of its genius is it provides an explanation for Wonderland's crisis that is equal parts fantasy and reality. Alice's personal trauma is explored a little but there's a lot of room for her to grieve and grow as the series continues. It's also about a magical expression of community trauma, and where Alice's life fits within that.

I'm particularly excited about the handling of Hatta and the Twins, they're my favorite characters from the original and I love them even more here.

This book leaves a lot unresolved so I'm glad there are sequels. It feels like stage one of a much more epic story and I'm very ready to find out what happens next.

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

T. A. D. positions a human and a former Angel of Death so that they can mutually grow and inspire each other to be better. This isn't a linear process, and early on the characters are pretty rough, to themselves and to those around them. Learning to live.

This book paints a loving but messy portrayal of drag culture, mostly set in the early/mid 2000's, with an earnestness and detail that makes it come to life. There is such fondness expressed in the book, looking backwards when the story moves on from that time in the character's lives, but also in the vividness of the portrayal in the early part of the story. 

The one thing that gave me pause was the way that one character's asexuality (or something that looks very close to it) is handled. This character seemed to be initially written as asexual, but felt (mostly internal/people-pleasing) pressure to perform sexually. I think the resolution works all right, but the process of getting there may be stressful to some readers, so proceed with care if the rhetoric and/or pressures of mainstream allosexual culture are likely to be triggering for you. 

The ending was touching and meaningful, a measure of peace in a book about how hard that can be to find. I just wish the story had spent more time dwelling in that peace after being so stressful early on. The conclusion felt like the characters had (years of) aftercare, but as a reader I wasn't quite ready for everything to be resolved.

Overall I enjoyed it, and I would recommend it to someone who wants a version of time-travel and a hint of multiverses without being a sci-fi book. It's definitely a different take on an angel losing their wings, and that was its own kind of refreshing.

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

Tales of Mundane Magic: Volume One is a magical slice-of-life story of two sisters in boarding school. It artfully balances fun with a sense of grounded-ness, building a world where magic is as ordinary and fun as playing catch with your ghost dog. 

My main emotion after finishing this book is fun, it's not shallow but it's generally very happy and confident, which was nice after reviewing some darker things recently.

The book is told as a series of vignettes in the lives of two teenage girls in a quasi-modern world where some people have magic. There are definite connecting threads between the stories, both thematically and in terms of recurring characters. There isn't some grand overarching problem to solve, just a series of magically-involved incidents in their lives. Some elements of earlier stories provide the solutions to later problems because they have implied continuity of existence behind even though we only get small slices of their lives. It has a light and fun feeling despite taking us to a funeral in chapter two and implying some pretty dark realities later on in the book. It's generally breezy and whimsical, to the two girls every problem has an easily discernible solution but the magical nature of them made it feel novel and fresh to me as a reader. 

Part of why I like this book is they and their friends are fully teens, with a confidence borne of not knowing how easily everything can turn out badly, and enough prowess and understanding to make some very interesting things happen.

The Priory of the Orange Tree has lesbians, dragons, and magic in an epic mix which crosses nations and seas to stop an evil 1000 years in the making. The political intrigue and religious clashes drive the actions of individuals and the fate of nations.

Reading this in the spring of 2020, it requires a content warning for plague and a country-wide quarantine, but while mentions of the plague are frequent, depictions of it occur sparsely and can easily be skipped without distorting the story. Please take care of yourselves.

I love doorstoppers, especially fantasy doorstoppers with dragons, thousand-year cycles, curses, betrayal, intrigue, murder, and magic. What I didn't expect, because I haven't been taught to expect it, was queer romance and complex intimacy a fantasy novel. There's a breadth of queerness too; lost loves, forbidden loves, and as close to a canon asexual character as you can get without anachronistically using the term outright. I began the book very worried that it would become a "bury your gays" situation, but I was very glad to see that it was not.

Every narrator is unreliable, in a way, as they all are working from incomplete and contradictory information regarding some major historical events (and some personal ones). The way this is resolved was ingenious, and far more complex than one side or the other simply being incorrect about their own religious history.

The beginning felt a little slow, partly because there were so many characters and settings to establish, but once I had a sense of the main players the story flew by. The political intrigue was detailed and multi-faceted, the various sets of power dynamics were well-constructed. Even for characters I didn't know well, their actions made sense within the politics that I did know, without needing dramatic monologues explaining their motives. This allowed the few Big Damn Villain speeches to carry weight, as the impact hadn't been blunted on minor reveals of petty (and not so petty) antagonists.

Overall I liked this book a lot, and while I don't know if it's one I would re-read soon, it's definitely one I'd recommend to anyone looking for dragon-filled fantasy with excellent depictions of queerness.

Vicious is a revenge/retribution story with a scientific and repeatable version of superheroes, a little bit heist-y. It's clever and fun, built around a strange friendship that goes very wrong when Victor refuses to be a sidekick to Eli's hero.

I love this book, I had a grin on my face for most of the time I was reading it. It's dark, but never really grim, somehow. There's a fair amount of death with just the right amount of gruesome. The backstory/prequel narrative is layered into the present day so that every point feels timely, every detail is a breather from the rising action without losing the plot. There's tenderness in Victor's darkness, a certain schadenfreude in watching Eli squirm as reality gets in the way of his plans. Sydney has just the right balance of actual kid and horror-film creepy child, Mitch supplies a refreshing upheaval and discussion of specific criminal stereotypes, and Serena would have been so easy to play as vapid with no redeeming qualities, but the book takes time to have us understand her too. 

I appreciated how each character has the space to have their own opinion on the ExtraOrdinaries. There's a nuanced discussion of the side-effects for this particular method of gaining powers, with even the EO's themselves disagreeing on what it all means. It makes it feel very grounded and human, at its heart this is a story about a pair of friends whose relationship went very sour very dramatically. I could see how everyone came to their conclusions, even though I don't agree with them all (nor would it really be possible to at one time). 

It's also a superhero story that didn't inundate the plot with heroes and descriptions of powers. There's definitely a place for that, and I hope to get more in the sequel, but that restraint is part of why this feels more like soft sci-fi with a superhero twist, rather than a more straightforward "people with random powers" narrative. The approach to EO's was scientific, specifically so. At least, it was experimental with a very loose application of the scientific method that wouldn't fly in a real study. Part of that impatience, moving past the guidelines they'd set almost as soon as they'd set them, made it really feel like what a bunch of young college-age friends with a little bit of a good idea and no sense of their own vulnerability would attempt. It didn't break the suspension of disbelief because the world was internally consistent, though I'm sure anyone who does scientific experiments for a living would have much harsher words for them.

I love heist stories, which is at least part of why I loved this book. While this wasn't precisely a heist narrative, it has a lot of that energy, that group of tropes that combine to say that sneaky and cool things are happening here.

 I want more, I will definitely check out the sequel. 
**I’m no longer planning to check out the sequel.

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

The Scapegracers is slick like new magic, fitting like a second skin. Gay witches, rural small-town queerness, the anxiety of new friendships, and the terror of being hunted.

The prose hums and clicks, conveying a train of thought without getting sidetracked. It's full of fricatives and phrases begging to be spoken into the air, hurled at the sky. The blend of literal descriptions and visceral metaphors conveys a sense of physicality, of being in a body while magic is in the air and winding through Sideways' skin. It has the teenage friend-group version of "feeling lonely in the middle of a crowd"; capturing a feeling of awkwardness and surprise at being wanted, being invited, being anywhere and having it finally feel right; dreading the possibility that it's all a trick, that anxiety that everyone is just pretending to like her and that they might inexplicably stop. 

There's a traumatic event early on (which I won't spoil) and the aftermath affects how they navigate the world throughout the rest of the book. It made that event feel grounded and immediate. It would have been easy to have it kick off the main plot and disappear, but instead it shows up in little ways through to the end of the story, continuing to have emotional impact. 

This is one of those where I'm having trouble talking about it without spoilers, but it's full of tiny moments and turns of phrase that just felt right to me. I could always follow the plot but never could predict where it would go next. I loved reading this and I'll definitely read the sequel.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes walks a fine line of explaining a villain without excusing him. A good balance of exhilarating and creepy. It fits well within the world of The Hunger Games, showcasing some intriguing origin stories.

The way we slowly get into Snow's head is very compelling. It was always very clear why he does what he does, while still making sure that the reader is shown other options through other character's objections or through thoughts Snow rejects when weighing various courses of action. 

There's a lot to like here, and a lot to love to hate. In particular I like seeing this early version of the Games, how it hinted at the controlled and sleek production of the main trilogy but it's very far from achieving that just yet. The songs are handled wonderfully and it was exciting to learn the origins for some of the ones from the original books.

Overall this is a good addition to The Hunger Games which could probably be read either before or after the main trilogy (if you haven't read any of the series before). I don't know if this would grab someone who disliked the main series, but Snow is a very different narrator from Katniss so it might work even in that case.

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The rest of this review contains minor thematic spoilers for the main trilogy.

Snow is humanized and made understandable by this book, but I think it manages to do so without excusing his terrible actions. There's a lot of subtle (and eventually not so subtle) moments where Snow is present when someone else puts forth a more compassionate course of action and Snow either disagrees completely or accepts the outcome while thinking about how this can be used to his advantage. When people do terrible things it's often because they either evaluate their actions without taking suffering into account, or because they think that the victims will deserve what happens. Both are in play here, for Snow blames the people of the Districts for the war in general and his family's current situation in particular. I didn't come away from this book liking Snow any better and I don't think I was meant to. 

Depicting a villain who went through some of the same things that the protagonists from the main trilogy did was an interesting choice that ended up working out well. We learn right away that Snow spent his childhood food insecure and on the edge of starvation, so a lot of his actions are motivated by never wanting to be in that position of helplessness ever again. It continues the theme of "hunger", since in the original books that hunger reached outside the Arena to permeate every bit of the protagonists' lives, now we find out that in the early years during and after the war that hunger reached into the Capitol. 

We discussed the original trilogy on our podcast, including its portrayal of hunger and starvation, you can find those episodes here: https://www.booksthatburn.com/category/suzanne-collins/

The Kingdom of Gods reckons with the origins and present state of the Arameri as seen through Sieh to make an amazing end to The Inheritance Trilogy. It complicates what we learned before without making earlier knowledge feel cheap, molding rage and sorrow like clay.

This was a deeply satisfying conclusion to The Inheritance Trilogy. There is a sequel novella to this trilogy which I will read after this, but I am content with what's here. It was tense, moving, contemplative, tumultuous, scary, exciting, and finally at peace, without losing zest and intensity along the way. It confronts and dismantles the Arameri's colonialist justifications which filled the first two books. They were challenged earlier, but this book brings things to a head in order to have a chance at a true reckoning for past misdeeds, of humans and gods. 

I loved Sieh as the narrator. I've loved him as a character since book one, and I was not disappointed by his spotlight here. Writing a long-lived godling of childhood in a way that makes him feel like a child when it's fitting doesn't seem easy, yet it was carried off in a way that accomplishes a complex portrait of childhood, not cheapening it by typifying it. 

This book examines and pulls apart old wounds, deep rifts, and sorrows from the dawn of time, giving space for healing and growth without demanding forgiveness from the people who were hurt. It is an artful example of confronting past abuses, both of the importance of doing so and of a few small ways to attempt it. The idea of a cycle of violence fills this trilogy, and this third book especially, but also there's a hope of breaking the cycles, of having something better than rage and pain to look forward to.

It's ultimately joyful without asking for mourning to cease, leaving space for both grief and joy, for people to have complex and contradictory experiences of the same events. 

Read this book, read this trilogy.

The Heart Forger is a strong sequel to The Bone Witch, artfully balancing two narratives to maximize the strengths of each. Powerfully queer, elegantly dark, excellently paced; good for those who like necromancy with their dragons. 

As the second book, The Heart Forger had a lot to live up to and it manages it beautifully. The main story and the interstitial narrative are given appropriate amounts of attention; there's a beautiful ebb and flow as the interstitial sections imply various results of the main story without revealing the details prematurely. It's a swifter book than The Bone Witch, it doesn't cover as much time and it doesn't have to do the heavy lifting of world-building that its predecessor did. That allows it the space for Tea to gain a sense of mastery and earned confidence commensurate with her already-established eagerness.

This remains a tricky series to discuss because everything I loved is a spoiler for something else. The handling of Tea's love life was very skillful, there was a tricky pivot to make due to a reveal at the end of the last book. Some of that work was done in The Bone Witch, but a lot needed to happen in this book for it to feel believable and I think the author pulled it off.

I was pleasantly surprised by where the main narrative stops. I wasn't sure how much more story could fit in before the past catches up to the start of The Bone Witch's interstitials, but the pacing is great and I'm left with a good mix of satisfaction and questions. I'm very ready to read book three.