booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

Melanie has been dying her whole life under the watchful eye of her alchemist father, Harry has been by her side for as much of it as he possibly can. When they both collapse during practice after school it kicks off a road trip with some strange companions to try and fulfill a destiny Mel was designed for and Harry was born for. But they're not the only ones who could fill their seasonal roles...

Long sections of complicated worldbuilding are conveyed through explanations, repeated with the building familiarity of a fable, and the shifting tones of a bedtime story gone terribly awry. Convoluted concepts are told and revisited, which makes it soothing and easy to follow, since if one version doesn’t click there will be another try. Most of the story is a conversation, between the characters, the narrator explaining the how and why to the reader. It’s a style where the “why” of each thought is just as important as the “what”, twisting and curling around each other. I love dialogue-heavy stories so I had a great time. The characters are traveling by car for much of the book, so the general cadence is conversation punctuated by violence as they run into other candidates, or the few times the narration cuts away to the aftermath of violence another candidate is doing elsewhere.

Mel and Harry have the comfortable rapport of a long-established relationship and even longer friendship. It gets a bit strained at times because they're young (still in high school) and suddenly discovering you have to leave immediately with a kid you just met can be rather stressful on any relationship. Jack ends up knowing so much that at times I kept forgetting she's still a kid, and I was grateful for the occasional reminders of that fact.

This wraps up several things left hanging from MIDDLEGAME, at first by featuring a minor character from that book. It waits until halfway through before pulling in any major characters from the first book, a decision which works very well to establish Harry and Mel on their own, completely separate from any of the very strong personalities in MIDDLEGAME. When they do show up their appearances are important and brief, confirming the stories as part of one larger whole, but refusing to overshadow the Seasons.

This is an entirely new storyline, linked to MIDDLEGAME by alchemical experimentation and the general goal of embodying natural phenomena in human forms, but featuring a new group of characters and a new way of ordering the world. It won’t be the last book in the series. It leaves open what these particular characters will do next, as well as the more general question of what other things the alchemists have got up to, what other forces are pinned to flesh or naturally manifested. It both introduces and resolves the very important issue of the Summer and Winter monarchs. 

This would mostly make sense even if you start here and haven’t read MIDDLEGAME, it’s such a complete story that I think it could be satisfying and understandable to such a reader. However, I definitely recommend reading MIDDLEGAME first, as well as the important but slightly more optional related series, The Up-and-Under by A. Deborah Baker, to know who Avery and Zib are.

As I approached the final chapters the resolution at first felt a bit anticlimactic, a bit too neat and solved after so much effort… then I actually finished it and that feeling is solved by one raising more issue and applying a more definitive catharsis. It fits the pacing and tone of the rest of the book very well, in addition to paying off a detail which was established almost as soon as the book began but hadn’t really mattered yet.

SEASONAL FEARS is an excellent sequel to MIDDLEGAME and a great book in its own right, don't miss it!

THE POWER OF THE DOG is about manhood and homophobia in the last gasps of the Old West, following a rich cattle rancher and his brother as one starts to have a life outside of their duo and the other tries to make him miserable enough to stay.

If you liked the 2021 film of the same name, adapted from this text, then you’ll probably like the book. The main changes are consolidations; placing some events as backstory instead of showing them as the book does, collapsing two side events into one, and to move Phil’s bigotry into fewer targets. The rest of this review contains minor spoilers, as it’s impossible to discuss what makes this so good without talking about some of what happens in it.

Phil is an odious person, a homophobic man who has based his hygiene and personal habits around as many opposites to his idea of a gay man in his era (clean, well-dressed, quiet, liking womanly things) that he possibly can. The end result is someone who bathes once a month (not at all in the winter), refuses to wear gloves (not even when castrating cattle and doing all the other bloody, messy work required to drive cattle and run a ranch), and uses his exceptionally sharp mind to whittle down the confidence of anyone who catches his ire (usually in language dripping with bigotry of whatever kind will sting the most). His closest relationship is with his brother George, a closeness which assumes George would never request distance and leaves Phil frustrated when George falls in love and marries a widow. He’s also enamored with his long-dead mentor in all things cowboy; Bronco Henry, talking up his wisdom and exploits to the ranch hands even two decades on from Bronco Henry’s death.

George meets and marries Rose, a widow whose husband killed himself early on in the book, years before the main story. Their son is strange, eventually assumed by Phil to be gay, called a sissy for his arrangements of paper flowers and way of dressing and walking. The boy’s quiet study of medical texts and dissections of animals hum along in the background, eventually he attends medical school with the help of his late father’s books. His actual sexuality is secondary to Phil’s perception of it, seeing the boy as weakness walking, the embodiment of everything Phil despises even as he eventually longs for connection again. 

Phil’s homophobia is one of a pile of bigotries which he wields like barbs when he’s irritated or inconvenienced. He most common method of addressing his brother is “Fatso”, and when Rose starts drinking in an attempt to stomach living in the same house as him, he belittles her for it, taking it as proof that she’s just taking advantage of his brother. His every action drips condemnation, that if someone has chosen to do what Phil would not, then they must be weak or scheming and their choice is contemptible. 

The audiobook narrator’s calm tone is perfect for this dryly delivered story which builds slowly, layers of time pooling to form the whole. The ending is quiet, managing to tie together everything in a single calm moment. It’s a resolution that feels like life, where one phase can unquestionably be over even as everything else continues on.

JADE FIRE GOLD stars Ahn, a peasant girl who finds out that her past is more complicated than she remembers, and Altan, in hiding and making a play for his lost throne.

I loved the first part of the book and then felt like the second half was just okay. It had a tendency to cut away after emotionally intense moments. There felt like too many scenes of watching someone open a door (literally or metaphorically), gasping at what they found inside, then immediately switching to the other character's perspective in a different location and a different emotional beat. A few of these switches were when Ahn and Altan were in the same scenes together. I liked some of those moments where one of them says something and then the perspective switches for the other person's reaction, but it started to feel like a movie with too much cross-cutting. It's a fine technique, but it shouldn't be the only way to edit the scene.

The characters' backstories are conveyed through worries, nightmares, and thoughts about how the present day is shadowed by the past. Because of the empire's use of physical mutilations as punishment followed by shunning, there are complicated layers of ableism established early on which then don't really go anywhere. The audiobook narrators work well as a pair, their performances fit the characters.

I like how there are several queer secondary characters, but it started to feel a bit like both protagonists got their own gay best friend. That thought might just be my irritation in the book as a whole coming out in something pithy, but it’s a thought I couldn’t shake once I had it. At times it feels more like they're queer so that they won't distract from the romance with the main pair, which was so flimsy that even the possibility they could like someone else would be enough to shred it. It felt like Ahn and Altan spent so long dancing around the idea of a relationship that by the time they actually maybe acknowledge their feelings I’d formed the opinion that they wouldn’t be good together. It’s just enough romantic vibes to keep it from being a platonic guy/girl teamup, but not enough romance to matter to the plot. It’s an awkward middle ground which might be setting up something for the clearly intended sequel, but as of this review in 2022 it doesn’t look like that’ll happen.

THE WICKED REMAIN concludes the Grimrose Girls duology as they try to break the curse once and for all, to stop the cycle of girls bent and broken to fit tales which deny them happy endings, and usually take their lives. 

The worldbuilding focuses primarily on details of the curse, the castle, and the relationships between the characters. This would be a hard book to get into if you’re not at least passingly familiar with a few key stories (Cinderella, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, and probably Sleeping Beauty), and there are a few more that would help (Swan Lake, Rapunzel). It doesn’t pause to explain their plots and only occasionally spells out their relevance. This is probably a good decision, given how steeped in them many people are through cultural osmosis even if they’ve never read them and never seen any of the film adaptations. I think this book halting to explain them would have been more irritating than helpful, but I’m noting it since anyone who’s managed to avoid every Disney Princess’s story will have a rough time here. I know there were minor characters whose stories I didn’t recognize or don’t know, but at least for them my lack of recognition didn’t matter much.

I’m torn about the way that one of the secondary characters is handled. She’s a trans girl whose story involves her (implicitly cis, definitely female) cousin being jealous of her and trying to take over her life (including trying to steal her girlfriend). Because of the way the stories overlap, and characters with their own narrative can fill different roles in other characters’ narratives, she also is implied to be the Beast to her girlfriend’s Beauty. It has room to have such an interesting narrative about monstrosity, transphobia, and jealousy… and then just leaves it there. The cousin is jealous because… I don’t know, the curse makes her jealous to fit Swan Lake’s narrative. There’s no real reason stated, she just is. There’s a line about how the cis(?) cousin thinks she can be a better girl/girlfriend than her trans cousin, which stands out to me as unmistakable transphobia, but it’s not named in the way that the other narratives usually have their issues and abuses stated explicitly by the end. It’s possible this gets more attention in the published version than in the ARC I read, but it’s similarly understated in the first book so I’m not anticipating this particular change. For anyone concerned I'll note that while I can't think of a reason other than transphobia to motivate the cousin, there's no deadnaming or misgendering, just a very weird insistence that she'd be better at her trans cousin's life than she is.

This wraps up a bunch of stuff left hanging from the first book, while also having a full storyline of its own. I don’t recall anything it both introduced and resolved, but it’s the last book in the duology so that’s not an issue. The ending wraps up things very well, with suitable conclusions for the main characters and the school as a whole. The ensemble of point-of-view characters is largely unchanged from the first book and their voices are consistent. This does a good job of relaying important information from the last book in a way that quickly refreshes returning readers and might even enable new readers to jump in knowing only the basic premise. It is the conclusion of a duology, however, so as usual I recommend starting with the first book before reading this one.

Yuki and Ella feel like the main two in the group of protagonists, but Nani and Rory get a larger presence than I remember them having in GRIMROSE GIRLS. The pacing is good, the number of main characters is large enough to feel like a full group and to provide a steady supply of answers and developments along the way. In particular, Nani’s storyline with her father get some answers I wasn’t expecting but were very welcome, and I’m very happy for Rory. The central mystery of the curse gets a satisfying answer and a number of suitably dramatic moments, and I like how it all turns out.

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

THE RIVER OF SILVER is a group of stories arranged alongside and between the main books of the Daevabad trilogy, showing hidden moments with characters you know and (maybe) love already.

To me, the best way to read this would be to read the stories alongside the main trilogy, in the order indicated at the start of each chapter. Because most of these stories were originally drafted as part of the writing process for the other books, they contribute to but are unable to alter the emotional landscape and general trajectory of the series. They work well as companion stories to the trilogy, but are unable to stand on their own for someone who hasn’t read the other books. There are some excellent sections relating to events before the main trilogy featuring characters not seen before, and I enjoyed. This book is absolutely worth reading if you want more of Jamshid and Muntadhir, singly and together. Many of the stories touch on the arc of their relationship, and for me the highlight of the book is a story featuring both of them which takes place near (or perhaps slightly after) the end of EMPIRE OF GOLD. Anyone hoping also or instead for more of Nahri, Ali, or Dara shouldn’t be disappointed either. 

CW for cursing (brief), sexual content (brief), grief (graphic), xenophobia, pregnancy (backstory), sexual harassment, sexual assault (brief), panic attacks, alcohol, fire/fire injury, blood (graphic), gore (brief), torture, body horror, violence (graphic), torture, emotional abuse, toxic relationship, suicidal thoughts (brief), genocide (backstory), self harm, suicide attempt (backstory), parental death (backstory), death (graphic).

Within the larger series, KILLERS OF THE DAWN is the third part in a trilogy with HUNTERS OF THE DUSK and ALLIES OF THE NIGHT and it's definitely the most dramatic one of the trio. It resolves a bunch of stuff from the previous books, but also leaves a huge thing at the end which will have many consequences for later books to address. It would not make sense to start here, since it's getting towards the end of the series, and this relies heavily on the books immediately prior as well as calling back to some even earlier events. Darren is consistent as a narrator with the previous book, but he's been slowly changing throughout the series and here he is most obviously changed from the young human boy he was at the start of all this. There is a lot of emotional consistency with his younger self, since he's grown up in ways that make him more suited to war but he's retained a lot of the ways it was easy for him to be a bully when he was younger.

This has a nice balance between stressful but more static sections in terms of location, and being on the move but not in immediate danger. It picks up where ALLIES OF THE NIGHT left off, and the ending has a lot of very stressful stuff happening. It's brutal, physically and emotionally for the characters, and emotionally for me as a reader. I'm very excited for where the series is going, and this has a good balance between resolution and setup, as this is getting towards the end of the series.