This book has a Pedro Pascal - esque storyline with a gruff mercenary protecting a uniquely powered child as they journey across the country, but this time she's a butch bisexual, so we're already up to 4 stars.

I really wanted this book to be 5 stars, and to be fair I really enjoyed it. The worldbuilding and lore is absolutely fantastic. The world felt so touched by the gods, and while nothing was truly that unique in terms of a fantasy story, it was done extremely well. I really loved the exploration of the smaller gods, like the god of white lies and the god of broken sandals. They felt appropriately inhuman and motivated by their own godly nature, but there's such a touch of humanity in their origin. I haven't experienced anything in the Witcher series, but a lot of this seems like it was reaallyyy inspired by it, from the monster killer with a little girl and a funnily named horse, but I can't speak to any other similarities.

Kissen in particular was a standout character for me. I loved every sentence with her. Inara, Elogast, and Skedi were all well done, too, and their internal conflicts were well done. Kaner did especially well with Inara, who could have easily fell into an annoying child character, but she was appropriately naive yet still competent and likeable. Her relationship with Kissen was especially heartfelt. My one gripe with the characters is that I would have loved more Kissen! Yes, she is a main character, but she's so sure of who she is that she doesn't really have the same amount of introspection that the other characters need, which made crave for more Kissen POV chapters. Also, the different POV chapters didn't feel too different from each other, which sometimes confused me as to who was the POV character.

The pacing felt a bit off, but I believe that this is Kaner's first novel so I expect that to get better over the series, and it didn't hurt my enjoyment too much. The prologue was utterly fantastic and visceral, and then it slowed down for a long time before picking back up, but as previously hinted at I'm in love with Kissen so I was totally fine slowing down and getting to know her more. Also I did expect the plot twist way before it happened.

I was wondering why Kissen wasn't drawing parallels to the knights that worshiped the Prince to the fanatical worshipers of gods she's faced before, since I made that connection instantly.

My other major gripe was the romance subplot.

Don't get me wrong, I like Kissen and Elo in theory and I really want to see their relationship develop, but the romance didn't feel earned yet. And the sex scene really came out of nowhere for me.  I know now one knows what slowburn means anymore, but I would have loved for the romance to kick off in the next book rather than here. As it stands I just didn't feel enough of a connection between the two other than general horniness or physical attraction. I just want them to be friends first.

I wasn’t sure what to expect going into this book, mostly about whether or not an intellectually disabled character would be given the nuance and respect he deserved. I’m glad to say that this book is written from a place of empathy and humanity, and it grapples with a lot of real traumas, emotions, and complications in human relationships. The focus on sex and romance was interesting to me, and I think it was needed as the right to sexuality and romance is a very real tenant of disability rights and justice. A lot of care was put into this book, even if it maybe didn’t get everything right, and it read as much more modern than I expected.

Going in I knew this wasn’t going to be my favorite book,  I don’t really care for the Anakin/Padme relationship, but I did end up enjoying it more than I thought. The book is split into a past timeline with Anakin/Padme/Thrawn and a current timeline with Vader/Thrawn. The past is much more interesting than the present. I really enjoyed a lot of the callbacks to Ahsoka and Anakin’s slaughter of the Tusken people,  it’s nice to see that these character’s past relationships and actions continue to have an affect on them. I also really enjoyed Padme’s POV, it made her appropriately headstrong but also clever and diplomatic. Anakin’s Force hijinks were fun and I do think the Force needs to be implemented in more creative ways, but Vader pulling those same stunts felt more like a letdown. This book’s main sin to me is that Vader just doesn’t feel that larger than life powerful or terrifying. Other people are scared of him, sure, but he didn’t have the same presence he usually has, probably because he’s always picking the same fight with Thrawn and deferring to him anyway.

Learning more about Thrawn and the Chiss, as well as other threats, was interesting, but I’m not sure if it needed to be put in this book, or if this book was even needed as the second in a trilogy. I’ll have to read the third to see, but nothing about this felt really that important rather than to draw people in with Vader. That’s another thing to me: these books are about Thrawn but they’re hardly ever about Thrawn, if that makes sense. We learn more about him, we see his rise to power, we see the impact he has on the people around him, and I don’t want to diminish the author’s work put into that. But we always get other character’s views of Thrawn, and any sense of interiority of POV of Thrawn that we do get is limited to his observations rather than any emotions or reactions. I know he has them, Vader notices them in this book, and it’s probably just a way to preserve his and the Chiss’s secrets for a later reveal, but it hurts his role as a… protagonist? Is he really even the protagonist of this series? Vader/Anakin felt more like the protagonist rather than Thrawn.

There were a lot of annoyances I had. For one, the “double vision” parts when using the Force were just not needed and annoying to read, and could have easily been reworded to fit with the rest of the narration better. Vader and Thrawn have the same argument about loyalty at least for times and it is incredibly repetitive and no new info is gained any time. Because of the nature of Thrawn’s thinking things need to be explained to the audience and characters so they can follow along, but I felt like some simple stuff was over explained and that has to be a better way to blend it in with the rest of the narration.

I’m not  what to think honestly. I definitely liked it, but I didn’t get all the answers I wanted out of it. It’s making me want to reread the series with a fine took comb, which should be seen as a testament to the authors skill. 

Ghost Bird/ the biologist, and the lighthouse keeper and the director storylines were fascinating to me. I loved that glimpse. Control was alright lol. I loved his character in Authority and while I still love it, he doesn’t hold a candle to these other characters. It made me look back on Authority less favorably honestly because this book was able to pack a lot more in. Though again, I think I need to reread to really get a full appreciation of all the subtle hints. 

I will say this series didn’t really read as horror to me? There are horrifying sequences and ideas, it doesn’t really seem like a full horror sci fi. Maybe that’s just because I click with very specific types of horror/have a high tolerance for some things. 

I was only familiar with the ghibli adaptation so I wasn’t sure what to expect going in, but this was absolutely delightful. Charming and hilarious prose, lovable characters, what more do you want. 

Chain Gang All Stars imagines a future where for-profit prisons expand into mass media sports, giving prisoners with life prison sentences the opportunity to fight in gladiator battles. If they survive for three years, they earn their freedom. This book draws from the history of slavery, imprisonment and the death penalty (often with footnotes of historical context) and merges it with modern day issues like the the commodification of black bodies in sports and the constant stream of suffering and victimization that we see on the news and social media. 

All of the characters in this book are deeply flawed people: rapists, murders, abusers, Nazis, etc. But the book provides them and interiority and treats them with respect regardless of the crimes they might have committed. You end up likening and rooting for these people, even if their pasts disgust you. It also grapples with some of the hard to answer questions of abolition: should dangerous people be freed? Can bad people become good? There’s no one concrete answer provided, as all the character grapple with those questions themselves. One thing is made clear though, and it’s that no one deserves the torture and inhumanity of imprisonment as we practice it today. The ending is perfectly ambiguous in a way that might leave some people frustrated, but I found it a fitting way to break the cycles apparent in the book.

I was unsure whether Thurwar was gonna pull a Bishop and Sunset and allow herself to be killed to further Staxxx’s life, but I like that she survived. She gets to break that cycle and maybe change things. Or maybe not.

It’s a very human ending to me.

Definitely check out the content warnings before reading. I think that everything was very tastefully done and nothing was described too graphically, but everyone’s tolerance will be different. The author has a very beautiful and lyrical style to his words that provides some distance to the actual horrors happening on the page. 

Really my only nitpick is the repetition that’s used throughout the book. I think it’s used wayyy to much, and while I understand what it’s going for, it just ends up being grating to read.

A very cute book for young audiences about the importance of community, communication, and cool gay werewolves.

I can understand why someone might be disappointed going into this book after Annihilation. It’s completely different than the tense alien mystery of the biologist in Area X, instead following Control as he takes over as the director of the Southern Reach. It’s a slow burn but I enjoyed Control’s character so much that it took me over 200 pages to realize that really no actual plot had happened. The slowness of the middle has a purpose, and I wasn’t bothered by it, though I think a lot of people would be. It’s more of a character study of Control and the Southern Reach, one that I stayed invested in. The pace rams up in the last 50ish pages, and I left this book very excited to finish the trilogy. 

The prose of this book is genuinely gorgeous, and the setting of an 1800s mining town but with a biblical flair of angels and demons really drew me in. You can tell the author put a ton of work and thought into the setting, and everything is extremely tight, but the book is so short that it didn't feel justified enough for me. This is a story that could have been told almost exactly the same way in just a real-world western setting, so while the angel and demon stuff was interesting, I kept wanting it to be more fleshed out so that something new could enter the plot.

The characters are unlikable, but I can still sympathize with Celeste and her motivations. Mariel, however, I didn't care for. If we had gotten to see her at all before the plot starts, just an interaction with her and Celeste in the first chapter, I might have felt a bit different. For a novella in which the main drive is a sisterly bond, we really don't see any interactions between the sisters besides... 2? I also have no idea what Celeste and Abraxis see in each other either, so while I enjoyed his scenes (mostly because Dion Graham as an audiobook narrator is phenomenal), he felt like a huge distraction from the plot.

Overall, I would have liked more! More worldbuillding, more character building, more stakes to the plot. I do think I will check out other works by this author, because she is obviously very skilled.

This book is well written, and the author did a good job of really tying the setting of a rural Australian town in a drought to every bit of tension and motivation in the story. I wasn’t too invested in the main character or his personality, but I don’t necessarily need to be for a mystery. Two mysteries are happening here, and both kept me engaged, but the reveal for both fell flat for me. I think that’s probably to do with the shifting POVs within chapters, where we get to see exactly went down television-style rather than Falk actually puzzling through it himself, which I feel hurt my connection to the character. Overall an enjoyable read, impressive for a debut (I think this is a debut), and I’d be down to read more books by this author in the future.