Review here: https://inkandplasma.wordpress.com/2020/02/18/belle-revolte-by-linsey-miller-review/

This book felt incredibly relevant in moments. Considering it's very much historical fantasy, the societal power struggles could have been drawn word for word from current events. It made the plot even more impactful, and added so many depths to it that I've been hungering to re-read it since I finished the last page. Reading all of my saved quotes for this review made me want to read it all over again (and honestly I'd saved dozens of quotes, so choosing one or two was nearly impossible, I even broke my rule for how many I use in a review). I'm absolutely certain that this is one of those books that will only get better the more times I read it, and once my TBR has been wrangled, I'm going to pick it back up again.

I'm usually a very fast reader, but I savoured this one. Sometimes I felt a little slowed down by all the names. I haven't read a lot of historical fiction, it's a genre I've only recently fallen in love with. Belle Révolte isn't actually historical fiction, it's definitely fantasy, but it has that historical fantasy air to in the way that the characters and settings are described. It felt very French revolution to me, which I adored, but it also meant that everyone had a million titles and that slowed me down as I occasionally got confused between character names. This was definitely a me thing and not a book thing, and I figured it out once I plugged my brain in. I will say that I found the end a smidge rushed. It felt like there was a lot of time and detail put into the beginning of the book and then suddenly it was over and done with all at once. The pacing was generally good, I just could have had another ten or twenty pages during the final act, rather than hitting 'the end' so abruptly.

Privilege and how it's used is a huge theme throughout the book. It seemed to leap off every page for me, and I absolutely loved that. It didn't feel lecture-y, it was threaded into every page of the story beautifully. Emilie was hugely, hugely privileged. She's a comtess, rich and well-educated and off to study at a highly prestigious school. It's not what she wants, but that doesn't send her into the YA-character trap of being ungrateful for her opportunities and dismissing the crazy amount of privilege she has. Instead, Emilie spends the entire book acknowledging her privilege and the way that it has blinded her. It was really motivating to see Emilie acknowledging her privilege and Annette, using Emilie's name and status, mobilising it. Annette used Emilie's family money and status with absolutely no regret to tackle aspects of inequality that she was able to impact, like pay for workers and lower-class members of society, and ultimately to support the rebellion. She is willing to cut ties without mercy if her friends won't stand up for what's right and I love her. Annette Boucher would eat the rich and I would help her.

They're not selfless all the way through, and I'm glad for that. Both girls developed so authentically and beautifully. Initially, Emilie wants to be a hero. She wants people to know her name. Annette, always told she couldn't, wants to revenge-succeed and prove them wrong. It's completely authentic YA selfishness. I spent most of my teenage years daydreaming about fame and renown, so I can't throw stones. By the end of their character arcs, they're seeing a picture bigger than themselves and acting as part of a larger motion. They want to do good, instead of be known for good, and it's a shift that makes them so empowering to read about. I want to be like Annette and Emilie.

The greater picture they become part of is that rebellion against the absolutely monstrous monarchy. But Belle Révolte doesn't hide behind safety nets and protect characters from death. It doesn't hide the realities of conflict against a power far greater than your own. Innocents die, and they die in miserable ways. Characters you will absolutely love are martyred, and it's all done with complete self-awareness. To win a war, good people have to die, and everyone in the rebellion was willing to give up everything to save their nation. The high-stakes rebellion was so tense to read, especially in the early sections of the book where I didn't know who the girls could trust any better than they did, so every time they revealed their allegiances my heart was in my throat wondering if they were making a mistake in telling the truth. It was intense.

The representation in this book hit me like a brick. I knew it had ace-spec rep, so I was waiting for that, but I wasn't expecting the power the scene had. I'm aro, not ace, but I always say they're sibling-sexualities. When one of the characters described her asexuality, it was done in a way that I'd never seen before. I won't spoil the specific way it's described, but I've borrowed Linsey Miller's beautiful words since to explain my aromanticism to people who don't quite understand it. It's described in a way that completely rejects the idea that aro/ace-spec people are 'missing' or 'broken', and it was so beautiful I immediately tracked down my ace-spec best friend to read her the passage. I can't personally speak to the trans-rep, but it felt respectful from an outside perspective and it wasn't used as a plot twist (I fucking hate that) while still highlighting how hard it is to come out and how transitioning isn't the end of coming out for a lot of people. There were just queer girls and queer boys everywhere and I was so happy to see all of them.

Full review: https://inkandplasma.wordpress.com/2020/02/28/unspeakable-a-queer-gothic-anthology-edited-by-celine-frohn-review/

I'm only going to cover a handful of the short stories in this actual review because otherwise it's going to be a novella in itself, but you can click through on this tweet ( https://twitter.com/inkandplasma/status/1230438880232583168 ) to see my as-it-happens reactions to reading each short story. There's not a single one that I didn't love, and it was so hard to pick a few to review. I limited myself to six of the total eighteen, but all eighteen are worth reading and will stay with me forever.

Taylor Hall by Jen Gilfort

If you freak her out like this, you're going to scare her off and who knows who we'll end up with. So if you could please do me the courtesy of acting like a normal house, I would appreciate it.

Emily is Kit's new roommate, moving into her house that has a bit of a... personality. Taylor Hall is sentient, and it likes to be paid the proper amount of attention. When Emily moves in, Taylor Hall falls in love with her, and the house isn't the only one. But Kit needs to face herself before she can face her feelings for Emily, and tell a truth that she's never told.

I was reading this one sat in the cinema waiting for a movie to start, and I honestly nearly left when the lights went out so I could finish it. I completely fell in love with Taylor Hall and Kit and Emily. When I hear 'gothic short story' and 'sentient house', I'm assuming something haunted and creepy not wholesome as fuck. I wish my house was sentient. The house had so much personality it was definitely its own character, and I loved it. Kit's struggle throughout the story was handled carefully and lovingly, and especially considering it had limited pages to do it I think it was done perfectly.

Hearteater by Eliza Temple

I thought she had to know, to somehow sense the frantic animal inside of me, but she simply smiled and offered me her hand. I took it.

Lady Scarlet opens her house to Kat when the woman shows up at her door in the middle of a storm, soaked. She swears she can't stay, but the woods aren't safe at night, not with a monster prowling them and tearing the hearts from the breasts of anyone foolish enough to get caught out under the moon's light. Despite her words Kat can't seem to leave - though she swears she must go before the next full moon. That's okay though, because Scarlet finds her fascinating and wants her to stay and share the house, as long as she never enters the West Wing, because there lies the truth of Scarlet's isolation - she's a monster.

I highlighted like a good 60% of this story, because every single line was beautiful. This story hit on some of the things I absolutely love about gothic lit. The whole way through, I was trying to guess what was happening, putting the pieces together from the crumbs of clues that I was given by the author. I was so invested in these characters and the ending made me feel riotous and powerful, honestly. I want to disappear into the wilderness and live in a mansion with a monstrous girlfriend.

Lure of the Abyss by Jenna MacDonald

I've never tested it out, but apparently, I possess the ability to be so distracting that male sailors will become bad enough at their jobs to anger the sea gods.

Imagine being caught at sea. Your crew has been picked off one by one, and now you're the only one left. They've been stolen into the sea by a monster with a beautiful face and you know she's coming for you next. So why is she just waiting, and watching?

I absolutely love mermaids. I just love love love them. And I love them infinitely more when they're not Disney-fied maidens with flowing hair but sharp-toothed monsters with oil-slick scales and a thirst for blood. I have a literal phobia of the sea and this made me want to sail out to the middle of the ocean and become one with the waves. This story absolutely nailed the creepy gothic aesthetic, and our MC was fierce and brave in the face of certain death. I just loved it, and I could read epics about her adventures.

The Moon in the Glass by Jude Reid

They found her body on my wedding night.

She was floating face-up, they said, her unbound hair spread around her like flames.

It's Charlotte's wedding night, and her brand new sister in law is dead in the pond. Charlotte is devastated of course, because she was so close to Ness. Too close, some might have said. Then Charlotte starts to see a flicker in the corner of her eye, a movement in the mirror. Something is following her, watching her. But why? Does Charlotte have something to hide?

This one gets a special mention for being GODDAMN TERRIFYING. I work in a place with a thousand mirrors, and after reading this I felt like I couldn't look directly at them. Sorry to any of my customers who came in the other day and saw me doing extreme gymnastics to avoid looking at mirrors, but this gave me those big Bloody Mary feels all over again. This short story honestly felt like a three act novel. It was so unnerving, and I felt a pervasive sense of dread the entire time I was reading it which is exactly what I want from my gothic fiction.

Homesick by Sam Hirst

Marion wondered if perhaps it wasn't murder which had bound them here but something much more beautiful.

Marion is a woman in white. She has unfinished business, it seems, but she's not much interested in finishing it. She'd rather read the books from her library instead - though she ran out of those a hundred years ago. Still, she can travel, and that's... fine. Then when she meets Sanan her world gets a little brighter - and not just because she has new books to read.

I want a graphic novel of Marion and Sanan. I want fan-art too. They're so vividly created that I could practically see them, reading together by the sea, and I love them. If they weren't already dead, I'd die for them. This story was beautifully wholesome, and made my little queer heart warm. Ghosts deserve HEA too. This was beautifully written, and gave me the same warmth and joy that I hope the characters found. I can see myself coming back to Homesick again and again as a quick comfort read to remind me to enjoy the little moments with people I love.

Moonlight by Ally Kölzow

"Don't ever do that to me again." The warning would not matter in a few hours, but she spoke it nonetheless.

Adanna chases Nina, her love in a snow-white dress, through a twisty, dark house. Her time is short, and the stakes are high, and she has to reach Nina soon.It should have been the most wonderful day, but it was stolen from them. The moon watches them, her children, and gives them everything she can to let them steal a few precious moments back.

Moonlight emotionally wrecked me. Hell. Weirdly enough it also reminded me of a fanfiction I read approximately a million years ago that I cried my eyes out over. Seeing a similar theme, this time with f/f characters? I'm weak and I'm sad. The prose itself is fluid and gorgeous, flowing like poetry, and the story made my soul ache. I guessed what was happening very, very early and if anything that actually made the whole story more impactful and painful. I knew what was coming, but I owed it to Adanna and Nina to make it to the end of their sorrowful tale. Moonlight is true love with a happily never after, a reflection of the true horror of being queer in history with a gothic spin to really twist the knife. Brace yourself when you read it but please, please read it, because it's too perfect for words.

Thanks to Stephanie Burgis for an Advanced Reader's Copy of this lovely novella.

Full review available on my blog: https://inkandplasma.wordpress.com/2020/01/10/moontangled-by-stephanie-burgis-review/

I really enjoyed this. I read it curled up on the sofa on a chilly afternoon and it was the perfect short, romantic read. I'm usually pretty fussy about my romances, I'm aro and personally I find I'm easy made uncomfortable by over-the-top romance. I didn't get that in this novella, and it meant I could get invested in their relationship.

I think I would have enjoyed this novella more if I'd read the other books. I think technically this can stand-alone, I haven't read either of the Harwood Spell Book series yet and I enjoyed this plenty, but there were definitely parts that would have been clearer if I'd read the rest of the series. I think the ending would have had more impact, and I would have been even more invested in the relationship between Juliana and Caroline. It felt a little bit like reading a fanfiction about characters I didn't recognise (which is something I do more often than you'd expect). That's only a comment on this as a stand-alone though, and I have a feeling that revisiting this once I've read the other stories will have me emotional.

This novella is a snapshot of a troubled moment in their established relationship. I think that added to the fanficcy vibe, but in a good way. Considering this is a novella, it still succinctly introduced the reader to the characters in a way that made me understand their dynamic and their backstories in enough detail to enjoy the story. I also had a grasp on the over-arching world and the way that 19th Century Angland's society worked. Magicians, traditionally male, and politicians, traditionally female, are your typical couple. But our couple flout all their rules. Juliana is in the first class of female magicians, and she and Caroline have been betrothed for three years. Their relationship has been kept secret until now (I love that trope) because of the societal expectations that oppose relationships like theirs, but they're at boiling point now.

This is a romance novella and I'm under the impression that they're together in the later stories, so we're guaranteed our HEA in a way that made me enjoy their miscommunications and misunderstandings an awful lot. I hate that stuff when I don't know how it's going to end, but here I was just enjoying wanting to lovingly knock some sense into both of them.

Full review: https://inkandplasma.wordpress.com/2020/04/03/once-future-by-amy-rose-capetta-and-cori-mccarthy-review/

This book was pure chaos. It’s also pure comedy, mixed in with real and fierce criticism of everything from capitalism to twenty-first century lgbtq+phobia. The whole thing had a wacky space opera vibe to it. If you like the tone of Hitchiker’s Guide or Monty Python, but you want diverse LGBT characters? You’re gonna love this book. It’s fast-paced, and no holds barred, and it does not shy away from criticising everything. It fires shots at capitalist monopolies, twenty-first century attitudes towards trans identities, sexualities and equal rights, and even the way that Hollywood white-washes history.

This book is queer as hell. It’s diverse in every way. Most, if not all of the characters are LGBT+ in some way, and they come from a society that means twenty-first century heteronormative attitudes are totally alien to them. I live for sci-fi and fantasy that totally ignores our own world’s shitty attitudes because there’s absolutely no need for them to be carried across to fantasy and science fiction worlds. They’re also really thirsty – and I mean that in the best way possible. This book is full of characters being hot for each other, and everyone around them, and I absolutely live for friends flirting with their friends. My friendship group is super-queer and we do the same flirting shamelessly thing that I love to see it in books I read. The characters are racially diverse too, and I can’t talk too much about Ari’s Arab-settled planet but the way that Ketch, and Ketchans, are treated is a powerful parallel to xenophobic policies that aren’t as historical as we’d like them to be. Ari, Merlin and her knights are found-family goals, and I want to read thousands of books about people like them. They’re also the most determined bunch I’ve read about in forever, and I love the way that they refuse to stay down when Mercer knocks them. I can’t talk about her too much without spoilers, but Morgana’s interpretation in Once & Future is one of my favourite versions of her ever.

Mercer are the literal worst, a multi-galaxy capitalist corporation with a monopoly on everything – including drinkable water, and they’re not afraid to let people die to get monarchs and planetary leaders to toe their party line. It’s gross as hell, and I was 110% behind Ari the entire time as she rounded up her knights, and Merlin, and went for them hard. But the authors balance the horrors of this destructive system with lighter moments really well, and it never loses the hope that kept me excited and reading forward.

As soon as I hit the end of this book, I just had to jump straight into Sword in the Stars, and my review of that will be up next week, but these books just scream out to be marathon-read and I can see myself coming back to them for light-hearted Arthurian hijinks.

As a general rule I am extremely skeptical of time-travel plots, because they’re usually messy and confusing and generally full of people messing up the timeline because they’re too stupid to follow the rules. This time-travel adventure? Brilliant. They didn’t commit any of the big time-travel crimes, and they were very aware of the fact that they had to stick to the legend. They, uh, didn’t. But they were aware of it, which made me a lot more forgiving. The timelines were also super clear. Which, considering how complicated the timelines are in this book, was really impressive. I knew what was going on at all times, and never felt like it was confusing me. The pacing was nearly perfect too, keeping things moving along but giving characters plenty of time for personal development. I still hate time-travel plots, but I loved this book.

This book is truly chaotic, and if it’s been a while since you read Once & Future, it’s probably worth a re-read first to get yourself up to speed on all the characters and plot, because Sword in the Stars jumps straight back into the action without any hesitation. It starts where Once & Future left off, with Ari and her knights being flung back in time to the original Camelot. Camelot was a hell of a setting, and this book does not flinch away from challenging the mysogyny, racism, homophobia and transphobia of the past, while not being afraid to call out twenty-first century culture alongside it. The call-outs were built into the story, given that most of the character cast are from a time when equal rights are so ingrained that they can’t comprehend a time when fluid and non-binary genders and fluid sexualities weren’t accepted. I also absolutely screamed when they called out the Merlin TV show for queer-baiting. I hope that meta-moment stays in the final cut, honestly, because it was so funny.

The plot is super engaging, but more than anything else it’s the relationships between characters that really makes this book shine. They’re complicated, and Ari and Gwen in particular are dealing with the fall-out of Once & Future, with Gwen’s pregnancy and Kay’s death making a mess of things between them. Val and Merlin are facing separation as Merlin’s backwards-aging is only getting worse, and that’s without throwing old-Merlin and the original Arthur into the mix. The relationships are made… extremely weird and complicated by a few things that happen through the course of the book, and I honestly love it. Overall this book is a really satisfying conclusion to an excellent duology, and it’s so packed full of love and determination and power, with a found-family that will truly do anything for each other and will always get up no matter how hard Mercer knocks them down.

Full review: https://inkandplasma.wordpress.com/2020/03/04/break-your-glass-slippers-by-amanda-lovelace-(review)/

I discovered Amanda Lovelace completely by accident. My best friend and I were poking around a bookstore on my birthday trip to London and she turned around with two books, and we decided to pick them up. That was 'the princess saves herself in this one' and 'the witch doesn't burn in this one'. We marathon read them both, and totally loved them. It drove me into my love affair with contemporary poetry, and 'witch' is one of my favourite poetry books. It felt like every single poem made me feel seen. The second series, Things that Haunt, didn't connect with me as fully as the first, but that didn't put me off from immediately requesting and devouring 'break your glass slippers'. glass slippers is a poetic Cinderella retelling, where we're all a little bit Cinderella. I absolutely loved it.

This poetry collection is empowering and strongly feminist. It's a very personal thing to read poetry like this, as it's a kind of catharsis. There are some poems I didn't connect with, love poems, but that's to be expected. I haven't experienced the same things as Amanda Lovelace, so I won't see everything the same way. Still, there were some that I connected with very deeply and I loved the body-positive poetry as well as the messages of falling in love with yourself first. It felt like this was very original Lovelace again, where I felt like Things That Haunt was intent on mimicking her earlier success, the retelling aspect of this collection made the content feel fresh and new, and gave a whole new lens to look at the poetry from. I hope that the rest of this series is equally as beautiful and motivating, and I can't wait to see what other fairy tale retellings she tackles next.

"Do you think I don't know what kind of men this world has wrought?" Red said. "Every woman knows. And those men existed before everything fell apart."

Rating: 3.5 stars

This wasn't my favourite of Christina Henry's retellings, and I found it a little harder to get into than the other books in this 'series'. Admittedly, I still read two-thirds of it in one sitting, but I'd been hovering over it for nearly a week before I did so. However, I do think that was partially because of my own personal tastes when it comes to novels.

I am going to my grandma's house, and if you try to stop me I will slice off whatever I can reach and leave you here to bleed to death.

Red is, as usual for Henry, a wonderfully fleshed out and realistic character. She's mixed-race, amputee, bisexual and completely bad-ass. She's a killer, brutal and without hesitation, but not because she wants to be. She kills because she has to, and only because she has to. She was ready for the Crisis, bag packed and plan in place, and when the worst of it hit, she took herself off to grandma's house. What Red is not is the Chosen One, and this story reflects it. She doesn't get answers, and she doesn't always save the day, because she's just fighting to survive. She spends days and days tromping through the woods, and not much time doing derring-do and crazy post-apocalyptic adventures, because she's just a regular woman in a world flipped upside down.

I did find, personally, that the story seemed to end a little abruptly. I felt like I was waiting for a more fleshed out ending than I got, but that might just be because I'm used to reading stories about that Chosen One who inexplicably saves the world. I did like the realism that it gave though, because in a post-apocalyptic world, regular people probably wouldn't know anything about the true nature of the Crisis and what was causing it, and they too would be forced to piece together clues from the things they stumbled across.

You're a wolf and I'm a hunter. I'm no Red Riding Hood to be deceived by your mask. I know what you are.