Scenes from the Holidays is yet another quick vignette series in which Edwards spoils us. These had more polish than Scenes from Quarantine. Everything is much cute, very schmoop, but Edwards slips in some very real anxieties about parenting and moving into the Sun Court. Ciarian is a doll. Family Status: Found.

Another tiny review for another tiny story. Or series of vignettes, rather. Though the vignettes have a slightly disjointed feel, the scenes were very cute. Our found family is coming along nicely. Also, God, I wish quarantine was this short. 

Oh, the hullabaloo of Book 2! In a shocking turn of events, I read the sequel to a novel in the same year I read the first installment. That’s how powerful the Tarot Sequence is!

Many swords hang above Rune’s head, but the closet one is Max’s upcoming engagement with the Hanged Man. By which I mean, no power on earth will induce Rune to hand over his ward to a serial domestic abuser and murderer. As an excuse to legally sniff around the Hanged Man’s properties, Rune and Brand take on a missing persons case. Instead of racing after Addam and tech bros, our duo race after Layne Dawncreek, a budding necromancer and child of the Sun Throne. The Hanged Man seems to be courting Layne for marriage, and the more we learn, the worse that situation becomes. As promised in the blurb, New Atlantis’ underbelly gets more explored. Also. There are mushrooms.

I could visibly tell how much Edwards has grown as a writer with this book. The Last Sun’s strengths—fun action, quippy queer characters, intriguing world—are fortified in the sequel. As advertised, female characters push through the groundling pit to take center stage. We love an older badass woman and her tiny badass daughter in this house. The novel’s pace is a notch or two slower, which gives the characters room to breathe beautifully. Edwards uses the same techniques to seamlessly blend in additional world-building, which was heartily appreciated.

Edwards is, however, still learning. And/or he really needs more editors. One paragraph is an almost word-for-word copy of a paragraph in the previous book. It’s hilarious that he got away with it, but the repetition feels slightly unprofessional. Race could use a defter hand. It’s revealed that Rune had indigenous heritage, because his ancestors married with the Wampanoag tribe. The stereotype of “magical Native” or “Native American magics” hung ominously in the back of my mind. I’m not indigenous at all, so maybe this factoid is innocuous enough, but I was uncomfortable.

Overall, I was happy burbling along with this book, like a duck paddling through water. The Hanged Man is good gay fun. Long live the Misfit Throne.

My review of The Last Sun: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/c9c9d09c-86b0-441f-8c1f-352a444dbb20 

In the Watchful City was another impulse borrow at the library. This harder sort of sci-fi is more up my partner’s alley than mine. After they read it, they had nothing but praise, so I read it too.

The future may seem lush with life, but the lushness hides sinister lies. The city-state of Ora maintains tight control over its citizens by having its police hook up to “the Gleaming.” This biological network can sense when citizens are about to commit a crime and alerts the police. The police officer then connects bodily to the Gleaming and can use the network to possess animals. Think Minority Report with a gooey plant people jar. I found it a bit of a plot hole how animals are supposed to arrest people. In any case, the lonely new recruit Anima begins to question this form of crime-prevention when a mysterious traveler named Vessel offers to tell aer the stories behind the objects in ser cabinet of curiosities.

With this set up, In the Watchful City gifts the reader a compelling frame narrative around a series of short stories. Qiouyi’s prose is drop dead gorgeous. The biocyberpunk aesthetic is on point. Many characters use neo-pronouns, and it dawned on me that pronouns can be as personal as a name. My only quibbles are personal ones. While In the Watchful City isn’t grimdark, the novella comes to some quite depressing conclusions. Living in 2022 as I do, the relentless grief bored me. On the other hand, I read the back matter, and I think In the Watchful City was the novella Qiouyi needed to write.

Even if hard science fiction isn’t your thing, I recommend dipping your toes in In the Watchful City. It’s a beautiful tribute to language, life, and unspent love.

Burning Roses was an impulse borrow from the library. My wife brought it home one day as a surprise, and reading the blurb resulted in much squee and happy cooing.

After fleeing her homeland, Rosa drops on Hou Yi’s doorstep in exhaustion. While Hou Yi nurses Rosa back to health, the two women realize they’re both running from dark deeds in their pasts. They form a companionable alliance, until the heavy peace shatters at the news of sunbirds’ attack. Hou Yi and Rosa set out to protect the common folk from these deadly beasts, but the journey demands they confront their fraught pasts.

That little summary might seem vague, but any more details would venture into spoiler territory. Huang tells a tight tale, with seeming innocuous details having huge ramifications. The beginning is A Lot, especially with characters so avoidant of their issues. Stick with it. To throw you a life raft, this world is like Shrek’s where folklore meanders together, and one person can fulfill various roles. Rest assured, the interweaving of Western fairy tales and Chinese mythology, the badass older, queer women protags, and the HEA are very worth the initial struggle to swim. Huang deftly intertwines culture and language in fascinating ways. I’m unfamiliar with Chinese myths, so the novella was quite tense, but the ending all the sweeter.

Bursting with justice, revenge, redemption and family, Burning Roses is a beautiful little book. I didn’t know it was part of a series before reading the back matter, and I’m excited that there’s more!

So, my review of the previous book in the Bone Grace series is “So many owl charades holy frick.” That’s it. Let’s see if I can do a little better, haha.

After realizing that murdering your boyfriend kinda sucks, Bone Crier Ailesse and her loverboy Bastien are ready to fight the inherited trauma of tradition and forge a new path. Sabine fully supports her sister and wishes she could just be a supporting character. However, being the secret love child of famille’s matrone, inheriting her mother’s position, and carrying the bones of a death god’s fursona put a damper on that. Speaking of mother, she’s in the underworld plotting Evil, so if a protagonist could take care of that, that would be great.

Forgive me for the glib blurb. Funny is how I’m feeling about this series. The plot is well-done, with tight beats, but these beats depend entirely on teenagers being reckless and running off on their own at the slightest provocation. These kids don’t know what they’re doing beyond the present moment. The audiobook narrators strengthen this impression. All the voice actors, especially Bastien’s, have an odd tendency to list the character’s actions, like one would a rather tense grocery list. Other little annoyances include how Sabine weeps and bemoans killing animals, but spares less thought for the whole ass dead humans. Besides the girls’ mother and Sabine’s father, the adults are absolutely nerfed at the knee. Some attempt is made at explaining their listless rule-following—this is the way it’s always been done; why would you change it—but the attempt could be stronger. Come to think of it, Bastien’s friends and the other Bone Criers aren’t developed at all really.

My last critique is how intense the insta-love is. Alesse and Bastien haven’t known each other long, and it beggars belief how intense their romantic feelings are. Alesse was his prisoner for a significant chunk of their relationship! Underground! Moist! Starving! Not exactly romantic. Yet I was supposed to believe that their romantic love is enough to change death physics. To me, it would have made more organic sense for Alesse to view Bastien as a good friend. I would not kill people for my friends. There would be something more noble or exalted about refusing blood sacrifice for a friend. The fact it’s a lover makes Bastien seem like a selfish treat dangled in front of Alesse. If Purdie really wanted a romance, Sabine and Alesse had intense chemistry, and I would believe Alesse wanting to challenge gods for her. Obviously they wouldn’t be sisters in this scenario.

This review has many critiques, but in truth, Bone Crier’s Dawn is a fun listen. The not-France France setting is refreshingly different and wonderfully described. The voice actors handle the French words with silver tongues. The world-building is cinched tight. The fight scenes are heavy, visceral, bloody. Sabine is dark-skinned! Yay Black French people! While the side characters are one-note, Sabine, Alesse, Bastien, and Caz live in all dimensions. The complexities of mother-daughter relationships flow off the page. I appreciated the theme that communities thrive when they interact with others—not when they’re closed off. The god fursona charades continue to be goofy, but I so love to laugh.

The Bone Grace series is a well-wrought, beautiful, but ultimately middling Young Adult fantasy. It won’t knock your socks off, but you’ll be entertained.

Review of Bone Crier’s Moon: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/6f4a8390-5458-4c79-89c2-0bcad6f8a0dc

After a childhood of Sailor Moon and Rurouni Kenshin, one of my teenage “second wave” animanga favorites was Vampire Knight. I watched the anime and read the manga as much as was available at the time. I tried keeping up for a couple months, but it dropped off my radar in favor of Naruto. Still, the Vampire Knight anime continues to be one of my “comfort watches.” I turn it on and tune out as nice background noise. Challenging myself to read 150 books seemed as good an excuse as any to devour all twenty volumes in quick succession. Though I place this review on Volume 1, I’ll review the whole series in broadstroke here. No spoilers beyond the first volume.

During the day, Cross Academy is a typical boarding school. Secondary school students do typical school things, such as study, attend dances, and fangirl over unattainable hotties. Yuki and her stepbrother Zero are the strict school Guardians (read: prefects), and the school needs them because of what happens at night. At night, the graduate students exit their isolated dorm and attend classes. Unbeknownst to the general populace, these grad students are vampires. Gasp! This is especially “gasp!” worthy, because vampiric society lives apart from humans and looks down on humans as “livestock.” The founder of Cross Academy wants to change this anti-human prejudice, and has set up the Academy as an experiment in peace. If the younger generations live in closer, peaceful proximity to humans and come to see the humans as people, the future might change.

As this synopsis might suggest, Vampire Knight begins as a more slice-of-life story before disintegrating into a supernatural romantic mystery. With their unique position as Guardians, Yuki and Zero navigate byzantine, vampire plots. The uber depressed vampire Kaname Kuran completes the main trio and love triangle, because this is a vampire story from the ‘00s so of course there’s a love triangle. Clumsy, beautiful, joyful, Yuki Cross is archetypical shōjo heroine. If you’ve seen the anime, know the anime does her a disservice, because she kicks serious ass. Her arc is compelling. I was enthralled with her dedication to joy, even in the most miserable of circumstances. Both Zero and Kaname are Sad Boys Full of Self-Loathing, but go different directions with it. Honestly, with all the narrative foils, erotic rivalry, and parallels among these characters, an air of incest hangs over the series. 

SPOILER:

Then again, there’s literal, full-blooded, and multi-generational incest.

Speaking of things dark and spooky, Vampire Knight is touted as Gothic, and it is, but not in the typical way. The Goth aesthetic is indulged. This manga is brought to you by anime hair and eyeliner, haha. At first, I was dazzled by this heightened beauty, but I was tired of it by Volume 20. The characters looked same-y and only distinguished by how they part their hair. While Cross Academy is a big set piece, it’s no Victorian manor surrounded by mist and decay. In fact, the backgrounds of this series, like the character design, are rather plain. 

Instead, it’s the vampires who represent the cruel, inescapable past. These immortals were literally present for the deep horror and hurt, and not all of them choose to let it go. Kaname fills the role of Byronic, Gothic hero with chilling determination. His stubborn refusal to be happy, despite repeated chances to be so, hit uncomfortably close to home. My interest in his character lessoned over time. He frustrated me. Hino insisted that his self-destructive depression was interesting to the end of the series, after there was really nothing left to say. Kaname’s character arc just hit dead end after dead end. Yes, he’s depressed, we get it! After fifteen volumes, the pain is banal.

Worse, more interesting themes and characters become more mealy-mouthed to make room for Kaname brooding alone in a room yet again. We miss the mess of Zero’s journey towards self-acceptance. After certain events, Cross’s philosophy of peace feels like cheap lip-service, because the narrative refuses to delve into the paradox of tolerance, or take to task its villains. Yuki gains a bunch of powers, but they’re neither explained nor explored. She can Just Do That Now. Society goes through several revolutions and literally a thousand years pass, but technology is stagnant. What’s that about? People throw around the words “being human,” but what does that mean? Vampire Knight has a happy ending, but we hardly get to enjoy it before the series ends. I suppose that’s what Vampire Knight: Memories is for?

All told, Vampire Knight is a middling series. I appreciated the thesis that happiness can’t totally rely on another person, and is more a choice one makes. I’m fully Team Zero. High emotion and melodrama are what I wanted from this series, and it’s what I got. The vampiric twist was quite fun, especially on the standard Gothic damnation resulting from refusal to let the past die. I’d recommend Vampire Knight to those wanting to dip their toes in the genre, or genre vets who want to get into manga and/or turn off their brain and enjoy. It’s angst-riddled fun.

I continue to love any work that was lucky enough to be penned by Octavia Butler. Since my whole vampire phase started, people have recommended Fledgling to me, and the library had it on audiobook! I love libraries.

Amnesia-riddled, Shori wakes up alone, in a cave, covered in blood. To survive, she must find who and what she is. The “what” is beyond expectation—though she looks like a ten year old black girl, she is a 50+ year old vampire and genetic experiment. The “who” is more up in the air, but no less fraught. With thrall-making saliva, near immortality, superior senses, and super strength/speed, she has a lot of advantages over the humans around her. Yet she needs these squishy humans to survive, and thrive, in her terrifying “new” world, where other vampires hate her existence.

It would be easier to throw up my hands and say, “It’s Octavia Butler! Everything is amazing! Read it!” However, I’ll try to detail the amazingness to better convince others to pick Fledgling up. Like with her Xenogenesis saga, the characters are older, which was a refreshing change of pace for me. Also like in Xenogenesis, the world-building and discovery is done mostly through logical and sensible conversations. While I like high drama as much as the next reader, sometimes I want adults to Be Adults. The clear communication lends a sense of humor to the work, and Shori experiences a repeated, hilarious bluntness when she explains her abilities. The humans know she’s a vampire and are over it, haha. The queerness is A+, with a special shout out to the love of MILFs and careful polyamory negotiations. The romance is done in heartrending simple language and had me swooning publicly on Twitter. Despite some quite tragic plot beats, the novel contains a sense of fun. I can see what Butler meant when she said Fledgling was a break from the Earthseed series. As someone from California, the setting and its descriptions provide additional entertainment. I know that reference!

Racism—both fantasy and the ordinary—plays a large part in the work. No character wants to be racist, but racism is insidious in how it permeates everything. The urge to not be seen as anything other than good can blind whole communities to the hatred in their midst. This sort of next-step, pivot-to-the-left conversations on race are rare for me in fiction. The only other book with it that I can think of is It’s Not Like It’s a Secret by Misa Sugiura. Shori’s first thrall, Wright, reminds that outsiders can provide unique insight to a culture and point out blind spots. One of the biggest sources of discomfort in the book is Shori’s youthful appearance. Butler constantly reminds that she looks like a child, but this child is welcoming adult intimacy. Towards the beginning, I worried that I’d have to tap out, because there’s a definite squick factor afoot. What helped me was reading Fledgling’s Wikipedia page. Reviewers noted that Shori’s situation commented on how black children, especially girls, aren’t allowed a childhood. I mean, look at court records. Black children are consistently tried as adults. Once I had this frame of reference, the discomfort lessoned enough I could finish the novel.

Overall, Fledgling is a treasure unto itself, which I could read over and over again. Butler is at her height. 

For reference, my review of Lilith’s Brood aka Xenogenesis Saga: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/7f7c5d36-106e-426b-b00a-2dbd534b9bc1

My review of It’s Not Like It’s a Secret by Misa Sugiura: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/0ac0915a-7586-41fa-84ae-25add5184457

A mini-review for a mini-book! The Sunken Mall contrasts high amounts of adorbz with some realistic struggles about first time dating and adopting a troubled teenager. Turns out trauma has left Rune and Brand with a fear of crowds, and I felt that in my gut. Ciarian is a delight, and I loved the twist of the Elementals. The novella’s highlights are the heartwarming character beats, which were missing from The Last Sun. I heartily recommend The Sunken Mall to all Tarot Sequence fans, especially since it’s the low, low price of $0!

After hearing the bookseller’s pitch for She Gets the Girl, we bought a signed copy. The authors are Pittsburgh locals and wives, and the book is a loose retelling of their love story. How adorable is that?? Plus, it was a perfect light read for our sapphic book club.

Despite her young age, Alex Blackwood is already an experienced, flirty customer service rep. She’s had to grow up fast to take care of her alcoholic mother. Just when she feels she’s got money and her mom handled—enough to go to college five hours away at least—her girlfriend Natalie (lol) drops a bomb. Prove she can maintain a platonic friendship, or they’re over.

Molly Parker is a painfully shy nerd who longs to date her high school crush, Cora Myers. When she hears that she and Cora are both attending University of Pittsburgh, she wants to seize this second chance. It’s easy to go from zero friends in high school to one sparkly new girlfriend, right? When Alex figures out Molly’s goal, she has a proposition to solve both their problems. She’ll teach Molly how to snag a date (in five easy steps no less), and Molly will vouch for Alex when Natalie visits.

You can guess what happens. My main reaction to She Gets the Girl was CUTE CUTE HOMOSEXUAL CUTE. From start to finish, this novel gloried in rom-com fluff, with gentle nudges to get the reader thinking. The character work shone. Everyone is casually queer, because why wouldn’t they be. While I’ve read/watched a lot of media complicate the “Blonde Bimbo” stereotype, less media has complicate the “Awkward, Shy Girl” trope. Natalie is the closest we see to a villain, and even she gains texture: Alex was an unfaithful girlfriend and had some growing to do, after all. Both Molly’s and Alex’s mothers have a lot of page time, and the contrast of the relationships was delightful.

Bizarrely, the only drawback of the book is what drew me to it in the first place. It’s set in Pittsburgh and I was excited to see the city feature in a lesbian rom-com! The novel frequently mentions Pittsburgh hot spots—Carnegie Library Main Branch, the Carnegie Art and Natural History Museum, the Cathedral of Learning, Schenley Park, The Phipps Botanical Garden—but they lack sensory details. During our book club video discussion, my wife filled the chat with pictures of these mentioned places, and our other readers gasped, “Oh!! That’s what it looks like!!” I chalked this up to the places being so familiar to Lippincott and Derrick. To them, these places are normal and every day. One can forget that others don’t know what they look like.

So that lost the book a star, but overall, I can’t emphasize how cute She Gets the Girl is. It’s feel-good, queer comfort. It’s a celebration of how college offers a soft reset of one’s life—a unique chance to change, grow, learn, and love. I would like ten more New Adult reads just like this one.