I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

These comics were really cute and funny and I think I've seen Cassandra Calin's work around before because her illustration style was very familiar. Her drawings are excellent and the physical humour in them is great. They're mostly relatable, which is where the charm lies, and as a coffee table book this makes perfect sense, it's fun to flick through and find random pages with funny comics. The only criticism I have is that in places it felt like there was something missing. As these were clearly designed from a social media aspect, it felt like there should be a caption or title along with it to give each drawing context. Most of them were fine without it because I could use social context clues to work out what was happening but some of the comics honestly didn't make any sense to me, and some felt like they were missing a punchline to make them funny.

I've never read a flash-fiction anthology before, so I wasn't sure what to expect but I really enjoyed this. Little snippets of story, but all of them showed the amazing talent of the authors to create a fully formed story in only a couple of pages. Very worth an hour's reading.

Do not read. This book is harmful and transphobic, written by a cis-woman allegedly worried about children being harmed - but not worried about the harm she is doing to trans children. There's no such thing as a 'transgender craze' and this book is potentially extremely dangerous.

Initial reaction: I am dead, I have been slain. I cannot WAIT to see a physical copy of this book.

Full review: https://inkandplasma.wordpress.com/2020/08/13/to-sleep-in-a-sea-of-stars-by-christopher-paolini-review/

Trigger Warnings: non-consent to medical procedures, death, torture, emetophobia (one scene but real gross), loss of limb, light body horror.

Thanks to Tor.com for the review copy of this incredible book, it hasn’t affected my honest opinion.

I went into this book almost completely blind. I honestly didn’t know one thing about the plot. I’m not sure I’d even read the blurb but I knew it was an adult sci-fi from Christopher Paolini and that was enough for me. In hindsight I think that that might have been the best thing I could have done. At no point in this book could I predict what was going to happen next. This year I’ve started to really hit my stride with sci-fi and I think it might have finally beaten out fantasy as my favourite genre (blame Tor entirely for that, with Murderbot, Gideon the Ninth and this book). To Sleep in a Sea of Stars hit every single one of my favourite sci-fi features. First contact? Weird symbiotic alien relationships? Snarky ships? Check, check, check.

I don’t know if I’ve ever actually read a book that’s wholly focused on first contact before, but it’s one of my favourite movie concepts and whenever it’s glossed over in sci-fi I’m sulking hard about it, so to read a book that’s entirely based on first contact is incredible to me. In To Sleep in a Sea of Stars humans have been expanding and colonising and spreading as far as they can with the faster-than-light (FTL) technology that they’ve developed. But thus far they’ve been alone in the universe. I’m not going into details because I don’t want to spoil anything, but the way that the humans respond to the threat of first contact feels uh….. uncannily accurate. And speaking of the technology. There’s a helpful glossary in the back of the book. I didn’t use it, and I found this book perfectly accessible without a hint of info-dumping. I don’t know how Christopher Paolini managed to fit so much complicated exposition into the text naturally, but when I realised how easily I’d picked up the jargon I was really impressed.

The character cast in To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is perfection. Kira is my queen of thorns, and I would trust her with my life and with the fate of humanity. Maybe I’ve got a soft spot for powerful women with Something To Prove, but I was cheerleading Kira hard every step of the way. The supporting cast is just as lovable and I think that they’re all well developed and individual, without drawing away from Kira, who is very much the focus of the story. And then there’s Gregorovich. Gregorovich is the ship’s mind, a concept explained in the book, and the love of my life. I’ve been thinking about him for weeks. He’s a monstrously powerful character if you think too much about what he can do. He’s also a total edgelord. I love him to pieces, and as the book told me why he behaves the way that he does, it only made me love him more.

I am the spark in the center of the void. I am the widdershin scream that cleaves the night. I am your eschatological nightmare. I am the one and the word and the fullness of the light. Would you like to play a game? Y/N – Gregorovich
No – Kira

Full review available from July 27th: https://inkandplasma.wordpress.com/2020/07/27/the-year-of-the-witching-by-alexis-henderson-review/

Rating: 4.5 stars!

Thanks to Bantam Press for the review copy of this book, this hasn’t impacted my honest review.

Trigger Warnings: misogyny, misogynistic slurs, branding, racism, persecution, pedophilia, coercive control, death.

I kept seeing The Year of the Witching advertised as a dark feminist story, and Alexis Henderson absolutely nailed that. It wasn’t the kind of dark that I usually go for, but I liked that. The Year of the Witching didn’t scare me, it empowered me. I honestly read the epilogue with tears in my eyes and a fire in my heart. Cliche? Sure, but I wanted to overthrow the patriarchy and rebuild.

The religious horror in this book included all the story beats I expected for a book featuring witch burnings, but at the same time it was so much worse than I could have anticipated. A lot of the trigger warnings in this book stem from the Prophet and the hyper-religious attitudes towards women. The women in Bethel are property to be handed from father to husband with little agency. Women are chosen as wives, and those married to the Prophet get a symbol carved into their forehead to prove it. Their role is homemaker and child-bearer and men can marry as many women as they want – while women are burned at the pyre for unfaithfulness. The way that Immanuelle and the other women in this book are treated is a misery to watch. By the time the plagues hit, I was rooting for the witches. But Immanuelle made a fascinating protagonist – and a much better person than I am! It turns out I have such a soft spot for infinitely powerful women who choose to Be Good instead of burning the world to the ground with their phenomenal cosmic powers (though for real catch me writing fanfic of Immanuelle heading a coven of witches and spreading plague).

The settings are as glorious and vividly described as they are terrible, and I could so clearly imagine Bethel wrapped in the Darkwood and the insular society that that kind of isolation would build, with the added benefit that no matter how awfully characters behaved, it never seemed outlandish or impossible. I adore horror that hammers home that people are far more dangerous and terrifying than any paranormal influence, and there’s no better setting for that then trapped-in-the-community. I kind of want to know what the world beyond the woods is really like, in the heathen cities, because it felt like Bethel was trapped in history and religious fanaticism.

The most beautiful part of this, to me, was the juxtaposition of the dark, evil actions of Bethel’s men and the Darkwood against Immanuelle’s fierce sense of right and wrong and the pure love she has for everyone around her. I absolutely adore Immanuelle, and I feel like with the right motivation she could do literally anything. It made it so easy to root for her, and left me finishing the book with a feeling of hope despite the darkness in the last part of the story.

Full review available August 10: https://inkandplasma.wordpress.com/2020/08/10/the-black-kids-by-christina-hammonds-reed-review/

Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the eARC of this book, it hasn't affected my honest opinions.

Trigger Warnings: police brutality, suicide, protests, rioting, arson.

Note: I am not a Black reviewer, and requesting this without checking that ownvoices reviewers were also getting copies was wrong of me. For each of the BIPOC books I requested in the last few months without checking they were also being distributed to ownvoices, I will be donating the RRP of each book to a Black Lives Matter associated charity, and in future I will do better. Be sure to sign petitions and donate through here, a BLM carrd (https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/)

It took me a little while to get into this book, but that’s probably just because it’s got a strong contemporary feel to it and that’s not my favourite genre. In saying that, once I got into this book, I was completely hooked on it. I was expecting the trial and the protests that fired up as a response to the LAPD officers getting acquitted to be the main plot of this book, but actually it felt much more like a coming of age story where Ashley, the main character, was finding herself and where she fits into her communities. Ashley is a hell of a protagonist, and I loved how well-written and real she was.

For someone who doesn’t read a lot of coming-of-age stories, I absolutely adored this one. I felt intensely emotionally attached to Ashley and her journey as she struggled with the explosive racial tensions in her community, and found herself torn between feeling ‘not Black enough’ for her community and ‘not white enough’ for her schoolmates. As a white reader I could never begin to imagine what it feels like to be torn in your own identity like that, but Christina Hammonds Reed does an incredible job of portraying the conflict and uncertainty in Ashley in a way that made my heart hurt. The setting itself was incredibly vivid and I loved the descriptions in this book. I felt at several points like I was walking down the streets alongside Ashley because they were so well described and the time period was so distinct.

Ashley’s ‘friends’ were deeply dislikable. I hated the way they treated her and the microaggressions that she suffered, particularly in moments when they acknowledged that she would be treated worse than them because she’s Black without seeming to care that their behaviour enabled it, and even joking about it at times. It was eye-opening to me to see so many little comments from Ashley’s perspective, and definitely made me think about how I can better challenge those so-called ‘harmless’ comments that aren’t harmless at all.

I adored the way this book handled Ashley’s family relationships, and how they were impacted differently by the protests. The scenes where the whole family were together were raw and real and I loved each member of her family – particularly their flawed and loving relationships. Reading about the protests was exactly as heart-breaking and enraging as I expected, knowing that thirty years later, the exact same fight is still being fought in Black neighbourhoods policed by white cops who get away with brutalising Black people under the guise of ‘protecting’.

Full review available from August 6th: https://inkandplasma.wordpress.com/2020/08/06/cinderella-is-dead-by-kalynn-bayron-review/

Rating: 4.5 stars

Trigger Warnings: homophobia, disappearances, execution, abuse, misogyny, racism, implied suicide.

Thanks to Bloomsbury YA for the review copy of this book, it hasn't affected my honest review.

I really liked the way that the world-building was done. It didn’t feel like there was an info-dump, but that it was threaded into the story very naturally, considering how much there was to learn about Lille. I never felt confused about what was going on, and I even started to put little clues together and predicted a couple of the plot reveals (though one in particular still totally threw me and made me gasp aloud). This is one of those books that made me feel as fiery with rage as it made me warm with hope as Sophia does her best to fight for what’s right, not just for herself but for all the women in Lille. The ending was perfectly tied up, and managed to heal where the book had just broken my heart in two, leaving me warm and satisfied and immediately wanting to order my own copy of this book!

The writing itself is gorgeous, and I already know I’m going to read literally everything Kalynn Bayron writes, because I wanted to devour the words themselves as well as the story. The way the characters interacted was beautiful, and I loved the complex relationships in the book. Sophia’s relationship with her parents was achy to read, their conflict between love for their daughter and fear of the consequences of helping her rebel made my heart hurt. Sophia and Erin’s relationship was equally impactful, and I felt seen in a lot of quiet, and still a little sore, lesbian ways as I read the early chapters. I wasn’t entirely sold on the main relationship in the book, I didn’t feel like it had that much development and I think I would have liked it even more if Sophia hadn’t fallen in love twice in the span of one book, however I do admit that I am a romance-grouch and that might just be my preferences!

4.5 rounded up to 5 bc this book is my aesthetic made real

4.5 okay this was nothing like i expected but it was SO good