I must be honest and say that this book was too literary for me, and that's on me, not the book. There were individual moments and lines that made me sit up and reach for a pen to underline, but the overall framing/voice of the book didn't work for me. However, if you are currently or have ever considered dropping out of a PhD program, returning to your small home town, and trying to process your entire community's grief and joy in one 150 page book, this one might just the read for you! 

My fourth read in the Wayward Children series. It's very interesting to me how Seanan McGuire keeps writing books in this series which the reader already knows the ending of, and how she maintains narrative tension when aiming towards a known ending. This one didn't hit quite as hard as Down Among the Sticks and Bones but I did enjoy seeing Lundy's life unfolding. The Goblin Market is a very magical and tempting setting, even if McGuire chose to skip over the biggest magical adventures Lundy had there and focus on the more mundane connective tissue of the going and coming from Earth. Honestly, part of why I keep reading these books is that they give me a lot of thoughts about writing, structuring a story, and what pieces of a tale you chose to tell- or not. 

A short and funny collection of one page comics, many referencing the terribleness of the internet, miscommunications, the fickle nature of the creative process, and/or werewolves. 

I've been hearing about this guide to writing characters outside your own lived experience for years, and as someone who wants to include rich diverse casts in my stories, I thought I should check it out! This book was published in 2005, and I think the conversations about own voices and diversity in the publishing world have developed quite a lot since then. I did find the first half of the book a bit dated. However, I loved the last essay in the book, "Appropriate Cultural Appropriation," specifically it's categorization of different writer's approaches to borrowing from other's cultures as Invaders, Tourists, or Guests. I'll be thinking about that metaphor for a long time, and trying my best to be a Guest as often as I can, and at worse a Tourist who pays for the directions and expertise I need to do a good job and not misrepresent cultures I didn't grow up with. 

A rich and emotional conclusion to the series, which deepens the themes of friendship, grief, and healing. I loved seeing Marjorie find ways to balance her commitments to both the living and the dead, Eliza learning that compromise is part of any relationship, and Wendell unraveling the truth of his own story. Thummler has grown a lot as a storyteller over the course of writing and drawing this trilogy. This is the quietest and most beautiful volume so far, and my favorite of the three. The art is absolutely next level, both in terms of color panels and page design. I was lucky enough to get to read an advanced copy for review; the book is due out in September 2023. 

Another strange little tale from Valente! This one is set in the future, when all of the dry land on Earth has been submerged by water, and the remaining humans live on the floating continent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Long before our protagonist, Tetley, was born, people sorted the garbage into huge piles of similar kinds of things, leading to neighborhoods made all of candle ends, or all of pill bottles, or of molding books. This lends the landscape a fairy tale-like aspect that reminded me of McGuire's Wayward Children series. Tetley was born to disinterested parents, and committed a crime in her teenage years which turns her into a physically abused and hated outsider. But she still finds things to love about her home and her world- a kind of childlike delight in a hibiscus plant, a plastic trophy, the inventiveness of her fellow survivors at the end of the world. The story takes several unexpected twists and turns, some more believable than others, but the playful language and rich audiobook narrative carried me through and overall I quite enjoyed it. 

I have to open my review with content warnings: violent homophobia, polyphobia, genocide of an indigenous culture by intentional plague spreading, brainwashing, rape threats, eugenics, murder, torture. This is a book about a horrible oppressive empire using the tools of colonialism to try and control more and more of the world. Baru is a child of a tropical paradise, with two fathers and a mother, who is taken away from her parents and placed in a residential school from which she watches the total destruction of her culture. This plants a seed of ferocious rebellion in her heart, and she vows to excel past the wildest dreams of her abusive teachers, to rise up in the ranks of the empire, and eventually to destroy it from within. Baru is a savant in the study of power, money, economic control, and the science of breaking the human spirit. The open question of this series is whether she will be able to achieve her goal without being utterly ruined as a person. This book is brutal, and so well written, by turns a confusing mystery and a heart-pounding page turner. It is not a light read, and I definitely need a break before I continue on in the series, but I can see why this gets put on lists next to some of my very favorite series such as The Locked Tomb and Teixcalaan.

Nonbinary historian-cleric Chih and their talking bird companion Almost Brilliant travel to the riverlands, an area rich with myths about near-immortal martial artists and the bandits and monsters they battled long ago. Chih ends up walking a mountain road with two young women- a martial artist and her long-suffering companion- and an older couple, all of whom prove to be more than meets the eye. All of them share tales with Chih, and when they stumble right into an ongoing conflict, Chih realizes that they might be in one of the very tales they'd been collecting. This third book didn't hit me quite as hard with the ending twist as the first two books of this series, but I still really enjoyed it and hope for more! 

Jess is a queer, closeted, Malaysian-American college grad with a long distance girlfriend and no job prospects. She decides to move back to Malaysia with her parents, partly to help them handle the move. When she starts hearing voices, she tacks it down to the stress of being broke and alienated in a country she hasn't lived in since she was a toddler. But it quickly becomes clear that the voices are real and one of them is Ah Ma, her estranged grandmother, who was a spirit medium to a violent god called the Black Water Sister. A real estate developer has purchased the land around the Black Water Sister's temple and plans to turn it into apartments. Ah Ma enlists Jess to fight back, not realizing or not caring that this could throw Jess into deadly conflict with both humans and gods. I listened to this as an audio book and enjoyed it a lot, though it does have some semi-graphic violence, and a morally grey conflict. The writing is very vivid and quite different than anything else I've read before.