booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

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

A DEATH AT THE DIONYSUS CLUB doubles down on the dangers of being a closeted homosexual in a homophobic society when Ned and Julian investigate a series of murders among the members of a particular men's club, all while trying to avoid letting the lead detective know what the victims have in common. 

This is a stellar example of story with homophobia entrenched in the worldbuilding in ways that affect the characters and make certain actions dangerous, but without filling the pages with slurs or overt bigotry. Their world is a dangerous place to be a man who likes men, and even though they are helping investigate a crime they're very aware that they could be locked up any minute for what they do at night. It's a story of trying to do the right thing and stop a strange series of murders at what might end up being a high personal cost. I like Ned and Julian as a couple. By making most intimate scenes fade to black instead of being explicit, the story stays focused on romance instead of sex, which may suit some readers who want a gay romance which doesn't double as erotica. 

As a sequel, A DEATH AT THE DIONYSUS CLUB focuses on Ned and Julian as they are more often in each other's company, working together on cases during the day and sharing a bed most nights. They're trying to carve out a space to be themselves, something which is made harder by knowing their late night activities are illegal for no reason except prudish bigotry. The worldbuilding delves a bit more into the magic system, mostly by looking into magic which doesn't conform to the modern system and reacts badly when the two are mixed. 

This doesn't specifically wrap up anything left hanging, but it does feature some professional and relational developments for several characters from DEATH BY SILVER. There's a new storyline which focuses on a string of bizarre deaths where men are being found with their hearts missing, and it gradually becomes clear that what they have in common is their sexual proclivities and their attendance at the Dionysus Club. That mystery is both introduced and resolved here, and while the plot wraps up neatly enough that this might stay as a duology, I have hope that it will turn into a longer series in this reprint with a new press.

NIGHT SHINE is a story about being strange, in-between, and not quite fitting in, in a way that explicitly includes queerness but is not limited to it. It felt a bit muddled because although the Sorceress Who Eats Girls fits this in-between state and doesn’t mess well with society, a significant part of why she doesn’t fit in is that she eats girls (and not just in a fun way). Nothing asks her to not eat/kill girls anymore and the sorceress is willing to do this for her, but I think there should’ve been a higher bar than "please don’t be a murderer anymore". The sorceress keeps bringing up that the girls consented to what happens, but the very first chapter shows one of these instances and I don't think the the girls are agreeing to what the sorceress ends up doing. This also shows up in the way Kirin is portrayed. It slowly becomes clear that he is willing to be manipulative and disregard other people's desires in order to get what he wants. There’s also the implication that Nothing forgives him pretty easily. 

The first part of the book is a really cool quest narrative, with vibrant and interesting characters. I like the early dynamic between Nothing, Kirin, and Sky. There's also a lot of fun wordplay with Nothing's name in the first half. I think Sky might actually be my favorite character, he gets more attention in the narrative than Kirin does because he’s present for more of the story. The Sorceress Who Eats Girls is a really compelling villain, but I didn’t totally buy the switch into a love interest for Nothing. There's a huge age gap between Nothing and the Sorceress, but it's not played with as a power differential. Nothing doesn’t really get a chance to decide that she might like something other than being with Kirin or with the sorceress. The ending was somewhat frustrating, but mostly because I wouldn't have made the choices Nothing does and so it was harder to believe the ending. That's not necessarily a problem, but it seemed like the ending prioritized continued friendship over addressing the boundaries which were crossed.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. I think overall, I do recommend it, but I’m not sure what point it’s making in the way that it plays with villainy and otherness. I'm intrigued enough to read the sequel, and I like that this book is unafraid to have messy and imperfect queer characters. 

MIRAGE is a story of a girl forced to be the body double for the princess assumed to be the next monarch of her colonized planet. As Amani adjusts to the strict requirements of her new role, she starts connecting with others who are trying to end the occupation.

I love the worldbuilding in MIRAGE. It’s concerned with language, culture, and class dynamics reinforced through colonization. Its suffuses everything from Amani's life with her family to the Vathek court and everything in between. It was obvious to me that many parts of the language are based on Arabic, and the interview with the author which is included in the audiobook clarified for me that it was specifically influenced by Moroccan culture. Even before I knew which specific country's history had contributed to the worldbuilding, there were so many wonderfully detailed moments which filled this picture of a people who went to space and have been living on this moon for so long that their culture references a long history on that moon and not their arrival from somewhere else. 

This deals heavily with the cruelty of colonizers, and the difficulty of Amani trying to stay alive when everything she does to preserve her life also helps her oppressors. The Vathek colonizers are quasi-European, culturally and aesthetically different from those they’re subjugating. Long stretches in the middle are a bit more hopeful, as every time Amani is sent somewhere instead of the princess it’s more time that she can interact without a harsh gaze upon her. One complication is that the princess is engaged to be married, so Amani interacts with her fiancé, Idris, who isn't supposed to know about the body double. I like Idris, his dynamic with Amani is really sweet. I especially love the way that they slowly begin discussing more of their history and shared culture together, since Idris was made to forget his first language years ago but Amani still can read and speak it. 

As the first book of a trilogy, this establishes Amani's transformation away from who she was before she was kidnapped. There's more of a focus on Vathek culture because Amani has to become familiar with the Vathek court to survive. The ending was a dramatic shift and I'm excited for how the next book handles things.

Ned and Julian went to a boarding school as teenagers, where they were bullied and tormented by the prefects, particularly Victor Nevett. Now adults, they find themselves in the strange position of trying to prove that this thoroughly detestable person didn't kill his own father. Throughout the present day narrative are shorter sections, showing what Ned and Julian went through in school. These sections help to frame their current moral quandary as something more viscerally understandable. They’re trying to find the real murderer, not to help Victor or avenge his father, but because Ned doesn’t want the real murderer to get away with it. There’s an awareness of class issues and the sexism built into their society, the way concerns of propriety get in the way without actually addressing the harms they’re meant to prevent. 

Because Ned and Julian already are in a habit of physical intimacy when the book begins, the arc of their romance is more one of realizing that they like each other as people, not just as fuck buddies. They're parsing through whether they’re both willing to entangle their lives in ways that might draw looks towards two confirmed bachelors. 

I like Miss Frost, and in this stratified society where the book is set it could’ve been easy to not have any significant female characters. Instead, Miss Frost is competent and thorough, gradually appearing more as things progress. She seems poised to become more relevant in later books, and I'm looking forward to reading more with her.

The magic system is described in enough detail to give a sense of what it looks like for someone to work spells, but it’s not so strict as to invite disbelief when some detail is too specific. I enjoyed the murder mystery, it’s sufficiently twisty and interesting to keep me guessing all the way through, while still having an answer that makes sense and doesn’t require outside information to be able to put things together as the characters do. I also like the way that Ned keeps having to work on other cases for other clients in a way that fit his situation as someone who only recently took over a business. It’s just enough to make it feel like his job exists outside of this one case, while avoiding the generation of plot threats that go nowhere.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, and am excited for the sequel.

Zach and Cara have never gotten along, but they clearly get something out of riling each other up. Cara doesn't like the way Zach gets whatever he wants due to his parents' position and money. Zach must at least somewhat enjoy riling up Cara because he keeps doing it. Cara agrees to help Zach in exchange for money, but as they continue on their journey and keep having to rely on each other, their rivalry and grudging cooperation turns into something more. 

Cara is caught in the middle of a rift between her mother and grandmother. Cara's mother denied her own ghost-speaking abilities until she lost them, and her grandmother lingers as a ghost in the house, speaking with Cara but unable to speak to her own daughter. Cara feels stuck between them, unable to please her mother unless she denies her grandmother's continued existence. She's also not as much of a ghost-speaker as her grandmother wants her to be, since she's afraid to disappoint or anger her mother more than she already is. Most of the book takes place during her quest with Zach to stop the venom from killing him for good, which means she has time to grow away from her mother and grandmother, space to feel more like her own person. It's an excellent coming-of-age story.

The worldbuilding is really cool, on their journey to find the antidote the teens pass through several different areas which all have their own atmosphere, wonders, and dangers. Some of the worldbuilding is clearly intended to lay the foundations for later stories, but because Cara is trying to understand her grandmother and her own history, nothing feels like it was only said for the sake of some future story. The details matter here, in this book, and hopefully they'll get to matter again if this ever gets a sequel. This seemed like it was a stand-alone book until the very last chapter, when it sets up a hook for a future story. It pulls on threads laid down throughout the rest of the book but which seemed to be just background details for the main plot. It's a smart narrative choice, since if there's never a sequel then this story still feels very satisfying and complete, but if there is more to come then it's a great teaser for later books to address. 

FEVERED STAR picks up where BLACK SUN left off, handling multiple perspectives in an excellently crafted way that was easy to follow. Now that Serapio is the embodiment of the Crow God, separated from Xiala, Serapio is dealing with the sudden change from being an isolated person to a religious figurehead, having lost everything that grounded him even as he gains immense power. Xiala is trying to rejoin Serapio, but gets caught up with a charismatic ex-priest, who has xer own agenda. Naranpa is an avatar without a temple, trying to connect to the brother she left behind years ago and figure out whether there's a life where she can fit. The worldbuilding focuses on different areas than what was established in BLACK SUN. No longer insular, many factions have moved in order to take advantage of alliances, and set up for the conflict that seems inevitable. 

FEVERED STAR is lull between storms, the midgame when all the players trade promises and pledge loyalties. The Sky Made has several factions, but most of the perspective characters are on the outside in some way, removed from the major factions by training, distance, or a estrangement. This is one of the best examples I’ve read in a while of intricate but understandable politics in fiction, with many factions who all have slightly different goals and motivations. It also does an excellent job of allowing people within the factions to disagree, each having their own motivations. I love political wrangling and intricacy in fantasy and so I enjoyed this middle book of a trilogy where everyone’s trying to reposition after the gods are returned to the world. It could be said that either every character has a new storyline, or no character has a new story of their own that wasn’t present to the previous book. Everyone in their own way of dealing with what happened on the day of Black Sun, it represents such a monumental shift that even ignoring it would have to be a deliberate choice (albeit it one that I cannot recall any characters making). Several people’s access to power has changed either in a political or magical sense, and some minor characters from BLACK SUN gain new importance as they hatch their own schemes, taking advantage of the shifts caused by the eclipse.

This would mostly makes sense to someone who read the first book a while ago, but if they tried to start here without having read BLACK SUN at all, it would likely be confusing for a while. It's a well-told story, but one which fundamentally is concerned with moving things in place for whatever is to come in the third book. Part of how it maintains that balance is that many of the characters have a sense of this as a lull between conflicts, whether literal or metaphorical. Almost everyone is making moves to position themselves better for what is to come, or to control what the next change might end up being.

This is an excellent continuation of the series, and I'm excited to read how it all turns out.

I read this as part of the Dracula Daily emails from May to November in 2023. This is an annual event and will likely continue to be available in the future. 

Dracula is a book which has been around for over a century, and it's a story that has known problems of racism and antisemitism baked into its premise and its execution. What I primarily want to rate here is my experience of reading the book through Dracula Daily, where everything is emailed in order based on the date of the piece of writing, rather than being in the order Bram Stoker envisioned. I, as a person, got kind of stressed out by knowing that this book was going to take months to read. On the other hand, since I don't have a strong sense of the passage of time, it was very cool to get more of a idea of how long the characters were waiting for news or how very long all of this travel took. When the characters were waiting for word or would put in their diaries that they were still waiting on a letter or didn't have information they needed, that resonated more because I also had been waiting. Or, occasionally, I was able to read a letter that was written but had not yet reached the intended recipient.

Overall, I enjoyed it as an experience, but if you looking for a vampire story to read there are ones with fewer old-timey bigotries. The emails definitely are an easy way to get the epistolary feel, if that's what you want.

OUT THERE SCREAMING is an excellent collection of horror tales from a Black lens. Most of the stories are set in some version of the United States, and many deal either explicitly or implicitly with the distinctly American flavors of racism and anti-Blackness which are deeply imbedded in this country. Many of them come at it sideways, it's the water in which they swim but it's not the focus of their story, if its referenced at all. 

I love "Reckless Eyeballing" by N.K. Jemisin for its sharp characterization and disturbingly literal execution of a titular pun. It's a great choice for opening the anthology. The ending of "Eye & Tooth" by Rebecca Roanhorse genuinely surprised me, and was well-placed to adjust my expectations of how ideas of monstrosity might play out through the collection. I appreciate "Invasion of the Baby Snatchers" by Lesley Nneka Arimah because pregancy is a triggering topic for me and one of the few ways I can comfortably engage with it is through horror. "The Aesthete" by Justin C. Key uses the language of Art to present a different and horrific system of denial of personhood and autonomy, making an incisive social commentary without ever stepping out of the story's frame (as the best horror does). "Flicker" by L.D. Lewis is a very cool premise which uses the short story format to great effect (I love apocalyptic stories). "Your Happy Place" is brilliantly layered, topping its own baseline for horror through a recombination of slavery and capitalism, two things which are awful on their own but even worse together. 

The whole collection flows well, don't miss OUT THERE SCREAMING if you like horror. And, if horror isn't your thing, go find these excellent authors elsewhere, as many of them have published work in other genres.