booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

Jack's style as a narrator (at least as far as I got) involves continually explaining the emotional landscape between the characters before there's any events which support it. It felt like meeting someone's friend group for the first time and having the introductions be a rapid-fire recounting of the last three fights everyone had while you're still trying to get their names to stick.

It opens by saying in the first few pages: 

The MC is dying of an illness which apparently no one survives past age 22, she's 21 when the book opens.  Her main personality traits are that she's dying, she has a best friend, and she seems simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by Sleeping Beauty as a story.

She oscillates between obsessively talking about how Sleeping Beauty is a garbage fairy tale and how she's dying just like sleeping beauty. It feels like someone turned their rant about how they hate this story into a retelling of it, but forgot to take the literal text of the rant out of the story. Huge sections of it are the MC talking about the flaws in the fairy tale. I wanted something that took the material and transformed it by rearranging it somehow, something that used the critiques to make the author's idea of a different/better story. Instead this book feels like a hate-write of the fairy tale, and I'm not invested enough to finish what would be a hate-read by the end, so I'm stopping.

Could immediately tell the style wasn’t for me.

The protagonist over explains every thought and emotion, and I now prefer things that leave me space to infer. I do like the well developed opening with the MC motivated to leave home after the religion of her childhood has no ability to comfort her in the face of her grief after her mother joins the unconsecrated (becomes a zombie). However this just wasn’t fitting me overall.

WE WERE RESTLESS THINGS is about the strangeness of grief, of continuing after someone else has stopped, and the impossibility of keeping someone happily where they don’t want to be.

Link died before the book opens, drowning in the woods, dying in a camera-shy lake that’s only sometimes there. His sister and friends slowly move into new configurations in his absence, jostled by the void he left behind. Complicating thing is the new kid, Jonas, who didn’t ask to fill Link’s seat but nevertheless must answer the implicit question of replacement. 

By switching perspectives throughout, no one character takes over the narrative, and every one of them is described at least once through someone else’s understanding of them. One of the characters is working through her wants and needs as far as a romantic and/or sexual relationship, including whether she wants either, neither, or both of those things. It’s refreshing in a way that simply declaring a label at her introduction wouldn’t be. She has important conversations with other characters where they discuss the particulars of what any of this means for her, what their own desires mean for them, and it feels like it would help a reader maybe untangle some of their own thoughts on love and sex, including when and whether they’re separate. By the time more precise terms are used they get to be a succinct way to label what her words and actions have already made abundantly clear.

By the end I think Gaetan became my favorite character. Early on he’s shown from the perspective of characters who don’t understand him. When so much of the early book is through Jonas who just met him it means that the reader takes a long time to learn anything about Gaetan other than his bleeding edges which are sharp enough to cut. Jonas is sweet but aimless, bumbling into existing dynamics without pausing to assess the space before entering it. He tends to notice that his presence changed things, but often takes a long time to ask what was there before. By the time he does, the others have moved on to react to the new status quo.

I love the ending. It leaves the characters in a place that’s better than where they started, but without trying to fix everything that is wrong.

THE VEILED THRONE is a masterful continuation of The Dandelion Dynasty, centering on characters new and old as the next promised opening in the wall of storms approaches.

I enjoyed Zomi’s returning presence, and I’m understanding Jia more and more as this series continues. The worldbuilding once again is expanded through an interesting avenue: a cooking contest. Through this there’s even more new viewpoints, but funneled through just a couple of perspectives to help keep it manageable (and to maintain certain mysteries as not everyone’s past is relevant and open).

This picks up Princess Théra’s story where THE WALL OF STORMS left off, as well as introducing some new characters and focusing in on some previously present but minor ones. There’s at least one major thing both introduced and resolved here. It specifically leaves something for later since a lot of the politics involve moves the various factions are making in anticipation of the wall of storms opening in a few short years, but the book ends with that clock still running. Empress Jia and Princess Théra are returning narrators along with some new perspectives. Their ways of thinking are pretty easily distinguishable from each other, and I pretty easily kept track of what was going on. It could make sense to start here, it would be an enjoyable story with its own central conflict within a larger context. I don’t recommend using it as a starting point, but once again in this series it’s a pretty self-contained story featuring a mix of returning and new characters, with backstory for at least one character given from years before the main events. This means in some ways it’s a jumping-in point for a few important characters, which helps it be accessible both to new readers and to anyone who waited a while since reading the previous book.

There are various sub plots and side plots, as well as a bunch of details about Princess Théra’s life hiding out in a new land, but the heart of the plot revolves around a cooking contest to save a restaurant’s reputation, and it’s delightful. The author uses the discussions of cooking, the small-town intrigue, and the wit of the participants as a venue for discourse on so much more than that. The heroes solve problems with engineering and ingenuity, with the underlying belief that the universe is knowable. Just as Zomi’s discussions with her teacher in THE WALL OF STORMS allowed for a different view of Dara, the cooking contest brings together so many wonderful things (plus a few dastardly ones) to the betterment of almost everyone involved. It has taken up so much of my recollections that I’m aware there were some other plotlines which I appreciated while in the middle of reading, but once I reached the end I was left with the impression of the story of the contest, and the stress of the ending scenes in the archives. 

NIGHT OF THE MANNEQUINS is an absorbing thriller, expertly balanced and engrossing until the last moments. 

Sawyer is a careful but unreliable narrator. He faithfully tells what happened, but his idea of what is literally happening versus what he's merely convinced is happening leaves a lot of very unsettling possibilities open. By the end I settled on an answer, but part of me still thinks the second option is viable. It shook me on a fundamental level and I’m still thinking about it days later. The story is told mostly linearly, and those small deviations from linearity start to add up as Sawyer gradually decides to tell backstory when it becomes necessary (but usually well after it’s first relevant). 

It’s fantastic, I loved every minute! I can’t recommend it highly enough. 

LEGENDS & LATTES pronounces itself high fantasy with low stakes, and it absolutely delivers. Viv has given up adventuring and now worries about things like building her coffee shop, attracting customers, explaining what coffee is, and other small intricacies of running a business in a new place, doing the everyday work that builds a cozy space for all who enter it peacefully. I love its take on a café cat.

As an orc, Viv deals with some conversational bumps as people tend to assume that the only thing she can be is the profession she’s left behind. Leaving adventuring as suddenly as she did left some hard feelings, and occasionally people from her former life show up whether she’s ready for them or not.

The worldbuilding assumes at least a passing familiarity with a D&D-style setting, and offers a lovely breath of fresh air which is something more exciting than the life of an NPC and less tumultuous than that of an adventurer… in the form of a former adventurer whose goal now is to build and run a coffee shop. It’s not a trouble-free endeavor, but the logistics are quieter and the problems are solved with tasty treats instead of violence. Sometimes Viv struggles with the temptation her sword offers, for some problems which arise have a more violent solution available to her.

The only thing stopping this from being the metaphorical embodiment of a fuzzy blanket, a requested hug, and curling up with my favorite beverage is a couple instances of ableist language, the kind of thing I routinely note and dock half a star for, but which don’t mar my overall enjoyment of the book.

It begins and ends with the fiddly and interesting process of designing a space for a purpose, full of details about floor plans, furniture, carpentry, and soothing conversations. Viv proceeds from step to step in a soothingly methodical manner, quietly surprised when she succeeds in building a calm and welcoming space, and even more surprised when she gets friends along the way. This is a delight to read and a breath of fresh air. 

FIRESTARTER asks whether Danny and Colton will let the towers fall to save the flow of time, even if it means Colton disappears forever.

This is a satisfying ending to the trilogy, not so much raising the stakes as much as making clear the personal implications of actions with global consequences. The book begins with Colton and Danny at odds because of Danny’s actions at the end of CHAINBREAKER, and both of them with Daphne who is very quickly furious at Akash. There are a lot of characters, but only a few of them are important enough to track specifically. Zavier is an interesting character, I definitely appreciate him more this time (he also plays a much bigger role here). This book didn’t add much to the existing worldbuilding, except to give some more specifics about the history of the towers. 

The last book basically ended on a cliffhanger, and this picks up right where it left off. There isn’t really a new storyline, which is fine since this is the end of a trilogy. It has something major which gets introduced, but it’s only implicitly resolved as part of the big finish. This wraps up a bunch of hanging plot threads, and handles the ending in a way that was very satisfactory for me. It’s only open-ended as much as life is, and the trajectory for the remaining characters is implied enough to give closure. 

The narrators, Danny, Colton, and Daphne, are very different characters from each other, but the third-person narrative style meant that sometimes I didn’t know whose perspective it was for sure until a page or two into each chapter. It would not make sense for someone to start here without reading the first two books since it heavily relies on a lot of worldbuilding and main character development from before. It is pretty friendly towards returning readers who waited a while between books since the exposition sticks to the relevant portions and doesn’t attempt to recount the earlier books. Early on some of the tension between Colton and Danny stems from something at the very end of CHAINBREAKER, but there are enough tangles of loyalties happening that it’s easy enough to note that they’re currently not getting along and the. continue following the story from there.

The plot was a bit twisty, since part of the emotional arc revolves around betrayals and loyalty conflicts which were shown in the prior book’s finale. There’s also more factions than were obvious before, but by the midpoint I understood the players and what was happening. My early confusion was at least partly because of the long gap since reading the second books, but this was still a fast and engaging read.

THE LUMINOUS DEAD is dense, claustrophobic, atmospheric horror, dripping with details. It builds a miasma of uncertainty by describing what the MC thinks happened then sometimes admitting that she was wrong, rarely revealing if her guide was mistaken too. The first half lingers on meticulous detail of the path through the caves, so that later we will know why a missing cache is worthy of terror, why the thought of pressing on towards one camp or returning to another elicits a silent scream. It tells in pieces a small and personal history of death underground, the dependence on the only voice around, helplessness when chance, mistrust, and technological failure cause breaches in connection.

I’m finding that I really like this kind of quiet horror. Books where most of the story is just explaining literally what’s happening, but the horror is in what should be happening but isn’t, shouldn’t be happening but is, and the precariousness of having to trust other people about one’s own body, in contexts where it is difficult to control whether or not boundaries will be respected. It understands that gaslighting is isolating and terrifying, and the terror is in being almost sure, wrong once, right once, and then never again being quite certain of what’s really happening. Hallucinogenic substances, involuntarily ingested, may be involved, in various times and manners. 

I love this for many of the same reasons that I love Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. The settings are very different, but they have many tendrils of horror in common. If you like sci-fi and liked Mexican Gothic, you'll probably like this (and if you like The Luminous Dead and like aesthetic non-sci-fi horror, you'll probably like Mexican Gothic).