booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

Joan's actions the end of ONLY A MONSTER created a version of the timeline where those she came to love and trust don’t remember what they went through together, and several don’t even know who she is. The actions of monsters and heroes need context in order to be intelligible, but ways timeline was changed have removed that context. Joan and Nick meet early on, drawn to each other yet again, despite Joan's efforts to stay away from this person who is achingly close to someone she wants, but doesn’t remember what the other Nick did to her family or what they went through together. Normally, I dislike stories where someone is arbitrarily not giving someone information that they need to know and which would change the context and emotional valence of the situation. But, in this case, there isn’t really a good time to tell someone that they were tortured and rewritten over and over until they were fine murdering anyone with a particular characteristic. That is something so detached from current-Nick that by the time he even has the context to understand what that would mean he knows too much for Joan to feel safe telling him about it. Her trepidation is completely reasonable, and it’s true to her as a character and to her understanding of Nick even in this changed version. Similarly, Aaron has a very good reason to hate Joan on sight, even if that anger is misplaced once its origins are understood.

Something I appreciate is that Joan cares intensely for both Nick and Aaron without any attempts to frame it as a choice between two guys. So much is in flux, and their stories are so complicated that I could be happy with an end stage for the trilogy, where she’s together with either, neither, or both of them in some fashion. She cares about their well-being, but not specifically in relation to her. This is very obvious early on with Nick, where she’s been trying to stay away from him so he could have a normal human life, not a hero. For Aaron, she’s trying to understand his history, and why exactly he’s so hated. She seen good and bad sides of him in the previous timeline, but she finds him understandable and relatable in ways that are difficult to articulate to the others. Her efforts to convince Ruth of Aaron’s potential goodness are repeatedly stymied by Ruth’s loyalty as a Hunt, and by her insular tendencies, disliking the very idea of trusting members of other families. 

I like Jamie and Tom as a couple. There’s a lot of care and attentiveness between them that comes through even though the narrative isn’t told from either of their perspectives. Jamie has the Liu power of remembering, which in his case means he remembers how he was tortured in the previous timeline. Tom doesn’t remember his own efforts get Jamie back, but he has lived with Jamie’s nightmares as they  intensifying in step with what previous iterations suffered.

One of the nice things about a great book where only a handful of characters remember what happened in the previous one is that it’s very easy on me as a reader who read the first book a year ago. I vaguely remembered what happened in ONLY A MONSTER as I began NEVER A HERO, remembering the ending, who most of the characters were, and what was driving Joan. The timeline reset creates this interesting zone where someone who wanted to align more with Nick’s perspective could try starting with NEVER A HERO, but they wouldn't understand what Joann is talking about. This does mean that this is one of the few trilogies I’ve read where someone could have a good and interesting experience starting with book two, but it’ll be a fundamentally different kind of story experience. 

The main mysteries left from ONLY A MONSTER are the identity of the villain who turned Nick into the hero, as well as the shape of her current plan. NEVER A HERO does a great job of answering both, with the characters piecing together their best understanding of what’s happening, and then eventually getting clarification during the villain speech. This is a new storyline from the previous book because the timeline change means their tactics and goals must be different. I’m not sure if anything is technically both introduced and resolved in this book, as the wobbly and overlapping nature of the narrative in the timeline means that things are answered which were questions in the first, and questions are raised here that have yet to be resolved. Joan’s narration is consistent with the first book, the biggest change is that unlike the first time, she already knows how monster powers work. 

I loved everything about this! I became very emotionally invested to the point that it was stressful to read at times because I didn’t know how things would resolve. The ending works very well for the second book of three, and I want to know what happens next.

AN UNSUITABLE HEIR follows Pen, the newly discovered heir to the fortune so contested in AN UNNATURAL VICE, and Mark, the one-armed investigator who has been trying to keep his friends and new acquaintances from getting killed as they attract the ire of the high and mighty. 

Closing out the trilogy, AN UNSUITABLE HEIR expertly weaves together the remaining story threads left open from AN UNNATURAL VICE. Pen and Greta are twins, trapeze artists, and most commonly known as the "Flying Starlings", present since the beginning of the series. The timeline overlaps between scenes are artfully done, giving new context and perspective to the exact same events by showing them through a different character’s perspective. Even reading the whole trilogy in two days, the repetitions of some scenes felt poignant and fresh at the same time. The trilogy as a whole (and this book in particular) have many discussion of class, privilege, and the ways that bigotries have similar echoes, even when shaped to hit different targets. Pen is some variety of genderqueer by modern standards, the historical setting means he doesn’t have access to that specific language. Pen's pronouns are the best he can get as both "she" and "it" are wholly unsuitable, and "he" works well enough when necessary. Mark is generally described as one armed, with one full arm and another that ends in a stump at the elbow. It’s a congenital limb difference, not something he lost, and he and Penn have several long conversations about the weight of social expectations and the dissonance that’s caused when other people are upset that their bodies are not what was assumed. 

I love AN UNSUITABLE HEIR as an end of the trilogy. There’s genuine tension in what Pen will choose, hemmed in by inheritance laws, the desire to do what’s best for his sister, and the need to be himself. Mark is caught between promises already made, and his growing attraction to Pen and care for Pen's wellbeing. 

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

TALES OF MUNDANE MAGIC, VOLUME FOUR features episodic slice-of-life stories in a world where magic is mundane, but not constant. It's one more skill that people have, but which not everyone feels comfortable engaging with or wants to learn. 

This is the “Oops, all Queer” volume of what will hopefully be many more to come. The trend begins with a few minor and secondary characters, and then gradually it becomes clear that this group of teens is more queer than was obvious in the earlier books. Age-wise, they're at one of the inflection points that would naturally lead to figuring out who they like romantically or sexually (if anyone) and what that looks like. In at least one case a character had known they were queer for a while, but it just haven’t come up to the reader before. When it does, it's worked in subtly but specifically, in a way that is unmissable for similarly queer readers and hopefully clear to others. One thing that I especially appreciate is that there doesn’t seem to be any idea of a "closet" to come out of for these characters. There are things that haven’t been mentioned yet, others that are hard to know about oneself until a particular crush happens, and characters who are just queer without constantly discussing it. All of that combines to feel like the world of TOMM has opened up and claimed contemporaneous queer existence without implying that the characters were previously hiding anything. My understanding is that part of the author’s goal for the series is for it to be a world that isn’t necessarily free of every prejudice, but at least isn’t copying and pasting the troubles of our world into this one. What's certain so far is there's no detectable queerphobia, or its varietals, and for that I’m very grateful.

Volume Four handles a few things that have been left hanging from previous books, such as the story of how Bridget's eye became magical, exactly how long Charlie is going to spend as an ostrich, and how things are changing in the friend group. There are several new storylines, as the book's episodic nature means that characters like Eliza and Franklin are entirely new in a way that adds options for future books, but events like the fair in the final chapter feel more like one off events. 

Bridget and Gertie are the heart of the series, the core surrounded by an ever expanding group of friends and acquaintances who make up the fabric of their lives. Now as they’re reaching adulthood they’re trying to figure out how to interact with each other as people and not just as siblings who spend time with each other because they don’t always have someone else. One particular site of tension is over their different levels of comfort with magic, and their relative abilities with the same. Gertie is actively pursuing potions and spellcraft, apprenticing in a shop that sells magic hats. One of Bridget's eyes was magically damaged when they were children. This has put Bridget in the position of having (frequently useful) magical sight, but being in pain from the accompanying headaches. This volume finally deals with that point of tension, where Gertie has frequently and joyfully engaged with magical situations (even if they involved an element of danger) but Bridget has felt like she has to get involved in order to keep terrible things from happening. It feels so realistic as a dynamic between siblings, the kind of thing that can lay unspoken for years. By the time each of them might have had words to say how they felt about it the status quo have been so long established that bringing anything up was more disruptive than letting the tensions sit there. In this case, Bridget was the one feeling the tension, while Gertie thought Bridget's evident stress was related to the headaches, not her relationship to magic itself. 

There were a lot of different narrators, possibly more than any of the previous volumes. Don’t worry there’s still plenty of Gertie and Bridget, but the chapters in between from other perspectives give time to breathe for the reader. The tension between them has time to simmer and play out in a way that feels natural, but also doesn’t bog down every story into the emotional gravity of their disagreement. 

I enjoyed this immensely and am excited to see where the series goes!

I don't like the main character and this leans more contemporary than I prefer.

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

This follows the trend of the witty, arbitrarily restricted genius of several recent popular iterations of Sherlock Holmes, but with a danger that feels at once too remote and too specific to make a lot of sense to me. I can tell it's aiming for a thing that I don't like, and so I'm not going to finish it. I like banter, I like witty dialogue, but I think I'm finally at a point in my life where I don't like someone explaining to me how smart they are with information I literally had no access to until this moment. The biggest factor in this DNF is I'd started to feel like I wasn't allowed to finish other books until I struggled through this one, and I don't like books that make me feel like I can't or shouldn't read other books. I'm definitely bothered by one character's personality quirk of wearing a blindfold at all times, and treating a refusal to leave her home as an affectation that exists to annoy other people. The narrative calls attention to it but refuses to explain. I don't enjoy being told repeatedly that I don't need to know something, or at least don't get to have it revealed at this time. It doesn't feel mysterious or interesting, just irritating and petty.

SUBTLE BLOOD presents Kim and Will in a new phase of their lives, one where Kim is no longer with the bureau and spends his days in the bookshop with Will. Their new equilibrium is disrupted when Kim's detestable brother is (rather plausibly) accused of murder. Kim has to care because if his brother dies he will stand to inherit his father's estate and title, along with the increased scrutiny that would make his life as a gay man much harder to navigate, or at least more difficult for he and Will to maintain any social fiction that they're anything but lovers. Capricorn has been dealt with, but it gradually becomes apparent that some form of Zodiac is still in play. The organization is full of people who had their own reasons for joining and perpetuating various kinds of harm in exchange for money and power, and those reasons didn't go away just because their leader met his end. 

Finishing out the trilogy, SUBTLE BLOOD wraps up all the dangling narrative threads that I could think of in a way which makes the characters’ lives feel ongoing, while still addressing what’s happened in this particular segment of it. The first two books leaned rather heavily on the idea that Kim is a particular kind of scoundrel who needed to work on some things before he could be in a relationship based on truth rather than various types of lies. SUBTLE BLOOD at long last addresses some of the ways that Will was changed by the Great War, asking him to figure out which of those coping mechanisms were still helpful, and which might better be given new shapes. This does a lot to make it clear that it's not a dynamic where Will is perfect and Kim needed to change. They both have things to work on, it's just that Will's particular coping mechanisms were more socially acceptable or less obvious for a while. 

It would definitely not make sense to start here without reading the other entries. Not only is this the final book of the trilogy but it’s one which addresses a lot of personal growth. Some form of confrontation with Kim’s awful father and brother have been a long time coming, and here it is. SUBLTLE BLOOD opens with Kim‘s brother accused of murder and acting the entitled and affronted noble, as if that’ll get him out of it without consequence, Kim is no longer with the bureau, but he hasn’t lost the skills he gained their, nor whatever appetite for skullduggery drew him to it in the first place. I like this as an ending to the series, and I've enjoyed getting to know Will and Kim.

WAKE THE DEAD has a murder mystery involving a dead fairy crime lord and a killer who was put out of her mind in order to commit murder. It's not the first time that people have had trouble figuring out why someone's dead in this town chock-full of magical beings, so Lili is pulled into the mess again while she's still mourning the loss of her girlfriend and dealing with the restoration of thousands of years of memories which don't necessarily fit the person she's trying to be now. 

The narrative style is very flippant and self-referential, beginning with jokes in the chapter headings and place descriptions, then becoming more frequent as the book continues. I think I understood most of them, but there might’ve been a few where the cultural reference went over my head. It’s very jokey, peppy style that reminds me of HOLD ME CLOSER, NECROMANCER by Lish McBride. WAKE THE DEAD eventually clarifies the fate of Joe, Lili’s girlfriend, who ended up incapacitated after the events of the first book. Much of Lili’s internal life is wrapped up in the idea of Joe and the shape of her absence. It is also very thoroughly a sequel. Trying at times to connect the reader to what happened in the previous book, it does so in a way that would mostly work for those who just need a refresher, but wouldn't makes sense for someone who read this without the first book. Generally, that’s fine, because this is the second book in a series, but the thing that bugs me about this in particular is that the story is so referential that what seems at first like a new story with the same core characters gradually reveals itself to have so many of the same players and concerns that it’s mostly like yelling, “and another thing”, when someone thought you were done talking. It’s a story I liked, and I'm particularly interested in the co-worker-at-a-distance dynamic between Lili and the detective, most of my favorite moments happened around him. Most of the catharsis and emotional weight in WAKE THE DEAD is dependent on circling back or dealing with things and people that needed more closure than the first book was able to provide.

I guess it did technically have a major plot line that starts in this book and is resolved which wasn’t present previously, but the threads of that are increasingly dependent on things established in the first book such that by the time the resolution happens for the inciting incident it feels like a sideshow rather than the main plot. 

Lili is still an immortal with depression, but one of the big changes to her narrative style since the first book is that she remembers her identity and the general shape of her powers, referring to them much more often in her internal monologue and with the other characters. I like the friendships between the main characters, Stace is a fun addition to the group, though I’m not totally convinced they’re a mundane human, even after finishing the book. Jason is mostly away, dealing with other stuff like trying to not get stuck doing the family business, and Patty comes into her own when she’s not competing with him for the narrative’s attention. 

It seems like more books are planned, which is good because it ends is a bit too abruptly to be a satisfying conclusion of the series. I do find it intriguing on a kind of meta-level to take more than one book to finish dealing with a villain who has powers based around forgetting.

THE ARCHIVE UNDYING by Emma Mieko Candon hits my brain like an achillean version of THE TIGER FLU by Larissa Lai or THE ALL-CONSUMING WORLD by Cassandra Khaw, combining viscera and technology to create liminal immortality in an ongoing negotiation, tenuous and vital. 

I love stories with worldbuilding that is immersive, not waiting for the reader to catch up, but just letting the story unfold; only explaining things that someone in the world would need stated, more explicitly. THE ARCHIVE UNDYING provides explanations late, intertwined with regret. 

As I’ve said before and will doubtless say again, I specifically love books which include mental transformations of nominally the same character, such that they understand some thing very differently than they did before, or have an entirely new state of mind. My particular favorite is when they are so different as to be a discrete person by the time the changes are done. THE ARCHIVE UNDYING is full of this, first with a narrator whose identity takes a long time to be known, and then with of variety of technologically assisted mental connections and transformative clashes of mind, such that even if everyone nominally remains afterward as entities, they are changed by those meetings. 

Reading this is an audiobook definitely helped to let the story roll over me, enjoying the flow of the words even if I didn’t always understand why something was happening. A few pretty significant changes happen towards the end which reframe and contextualize the actions of some secondary characters. It’s the kind of book where I know I will reread it, if only to experience the shift in perspective that comes with knowing characters, backstories, and ulterior motives from the start.

As the first book in the series, SPECTRED ISLE establishes the stakes for the main characters, mostly resolving relationship threads rather than logistical ones. This seems to indicate that the mystery at hand will be solved in later books, but that hopefully this main relationship can have a stable configuration going forward. My hope is that these two are good to go, and a new couple would be the focus of the next book. A quick look at the description for the sequel seems to indicate that my hope will bear out. 

I enjoyed this and I plan to read the sequel. I've had a good time with everything I've tried by this author, even if I don't always have a lot of specific things to say. One thing I appreciate is their ability to write so many different historical (usually fantasy) m/m romances while still making very different worlds for the stories. I'm particularly interested in the magical/political aftermath of the demise of Randolph's family, as the forces which led to that particularly terrible string of events seem determined to keep messing things up in the name of legacy.

THE SALT GROWS HEAVY is technically the story of a plague doctor and a mermaid, a description which does not do nearly enough to imply how cool and weird this book is. The main character is not nameless, but her name is explicitly one that cannot be pronounced by humans, and so neither does the story render it in a form I could repeat. It deals with cycles of abuse, a religious cult, deprogramming, reclaiming agency, and the need to rescue someone in a bad situation like the one you yourself previously escaped. It’s also about a group of children worshiping a trio of surgeons who claim that death is not murder because they’ll be brought back to life. The children become more and more distorted, changing into a strange collection of remnants in the hands of those who would use and abuse them under claim of immortality.

Khaw's style has clearly developed more since HAMMERS ON BONE (also excellent), and this is less of a romp than THE ALL-CONSUMING WORLD. It has their willingness to just let a story be bleak without being depressing, finding hope interwoven with death, plus a strange interlude into cult deprogramming. It is specifically a follow up to one of the stories from the collection BREAKABLE THINGS, called "And in Our Daughters, We Find a Voice". That story is included in the back of THE SALT GROWS HEAVY for anyone who needs a refresher.

THE SALT GROWS HEAVY is a truly excellent piece of horror. I’m very glad I read it. I hope you like it too.