THIS BOOK THOUGH.

With this book, I declare G. Willow Wilson one of my favorite authors. This novel sweeps you off your feet into a stormy sky full of jinn, computers, and magic. I never thought a centuries old book could connect with highest tech computer coding, and this book did it. I thought I knew the basics of Islam and living in the Middle East, but this book showed me I know zilch, and I'm so excited to learn more. I never thought an author could pack in so much character development during an action scene and I was wrong. I never thought a writer could weave religious philosophy and secular internet culture so well, with such a constant stream of beautiful imagery and Wilson freaking DOES IT. ALIF THE UNSEEN is part dystopian social commentary, part love story, part fantasy, part high-tech thriller, and all intersectional feminist masterwork.

This book had me on pins and needles. This book held me like a lover. This book was a home in a strange, far world. Literally everyone should read ALIF THE UNSEEN. You're going to love it. It's that freaking good.

I picked up Black History In Its Own Words on a whim from the library because books are free at the library and I love books. I read the whole thing in one sitting over breakfast, but don't let the shortness fool you: Black History In Its Own Words packs a gut punch like no other.

This book isn't a collection of quotes from the black community in chronological order, 2015 to 2017. It's much better than that. Being black in America hasn't ever been safe: the last recorded lynching was of Michael McDonald in 1981, and that violence has been transferred over to police shootings of and brutality towards black men, women, and children. The quotes reflect this history and are from luminaries of every time period. They're a quixotic, charged mix of rage and hope, creativity and love, courage and triumph. They provide solace and inspiration. As a white person reading this, I noted down names and books so I can educate myself more. Reading this book felt like a gateway to better education, and I'm lucky to commune with this strength.

With so few pages, Black History In Its Own Words is a profound experience, with vivacious portraits to boot. I recommend it to everyone.

I love G. Willow Wilson's writings. I loved her Ms. Marvel comics first, and Alif the Unseen clinched it. She's up there with Neil Gaiman for me, as one of the best speculative fiction authors of our time. It took me awhile to track down a copy of her memoir, but it was worth every moment of calling local bookstores and browsing libraries.

In The Butterfly Mosque, Wilson recounts her life at Boston University and her years in Cairo. To say those years were life-changing does not even begin to cover it. Breaking away from her atheist American upbringing, Wilson contracts a chronic disease, converts to Islam, graduates university, moves to Cairo to teach English, marries the gentle & loving Omar, moves twice within Cairo, visits Iran, gets investigated by the FBI, and moves back to the States. The most deeply personal changes, her conversion and marriage, she must do multiple times to fulfill the Egyptian/American cultural, secular governmental, and state religion standards. At one point, Wilson jokes that she and Omar have technically married over four times.

But listing the events of the memoir don't much touch its heart. Wilson's trademark ethereal prose and piercing insight is polished to mirror sheen here. One reason it took me so long to read Butterly Mosque is I wanted to savor each line and continue to live in the peaceful moments it brought me. Wilson's ruminations on Islam and what it brought her echoed my own thoughts on Catholicism. Her tender yet persistent attempts to understand Egyptian culture and Omar made my heart ache with memory.

One theme that hit me like a baseball bat was the balance Wilson struck between her USA birthplace and new home in Cairo. In a lot of stories, the traveler either gives up on their original culture in favor of "going native" or sticks to it, refusing to bend for the country they find themselves in. The former is especially tempting with USA's current situation, but Wilson does neither. She keeps abreast of American Muslim community news & USA political news, write articles for USA magazines about Egypt, and mourns her disconnect with the USA. Meanwhile she does her utmost to adapt to Egyptian cultural mores, to the point that other people remark how she's "a little bit Arab now." Like with Alif the Unseen, Wilson marries together two seemingly disparate things to fantastic effect, making the reader realize that Islamic Egypt and the Christian USA are not so different after all. Pun intended.

I could discuss other themes in the memoir, but then I'd be here all day: Wilson's brilliant pen also inks topics like moderate Islam vs extreme Islam; terrorism; Islamic law; police states and the Patriot Act; hijabi culture; and the real world worth of Ivy League education. Put together, The Butterfly Mosque is heart-fluttering delight, a feast of cross-cultural empathy and love, and meaningful and important book. I recommend it to literally every American, Muslim or not.

I found From Scratch through a twitter promo and the low, low price of $0 tickled my YOLO instinct. I downloaded and read it over the course of one evening, and what a pleasant evening it was.

Though From Scratch suffers from some grammatical errors, the characters and plot are first-rate. Professor Mary Woods hates being a professor, even though she's quite good at it. When she's skipped over for the prize tenure position, it's the last straw and on an impulse which is impressively followed through, she decides to move to the little town of Sea Port and become the town baker. Once there, she meets the stoic Miguel Santos and the jokester William Knox, both old marine corps buddies. Who may be in love with each other. And her. They all figure it out.

I love stories where the adults act like adults, treat each other respectfully, and each has a healthy dollop of self-awareness. Each leg of the triad is fully fleshed out, and I love the descriptions of the men's burgeoning bisexuality. Jackson describes it as opening a door to a previously unknown possibility. As a bisexual woman, I can confirm that's what it feels like. Plus, bi men are underrepresented in fiction, and the whole arrangement of M/F/M avoids the potential ick factor of straight male gaze intruding on two women enjoying each other.

The writerly goodness doesn't stop there. Jackson takes pains to establish that Mary, Santos, and Knox are happy and surviving before any relationship, but together they thrive, which was a lovely reprieve from the whole "romantic love fixes everything" trope. Instead of the isolated romance heroine cliche, Mary has a whole group of distinct female friends who support her, plus family. The sex is lushly written. The twist obstacle at the end had me turning pages faster and faster. The ending itself left me a gooey, happy mess.

Overall, From Scratch felt like a breath of fresh air. It's feel-good premise and authentic gender, race, & body rep put it a step above the rest. I'm eager for more of Jackson's work and recommend From Scratch to all romance fans interested in a happy, fluffy triad love story.

Stake Sauce has a lot of things I like: a cast of queer (aka not straight) characters of color, a punk fashion sense, friends-as-family/found families, and urban magical creature shenanigans. As soon as I read the blurb, I wanted to dive in and love this. After reading though, I think Stake Sauce is a few drafts away from a full five stars.

After the brutal death of their coworker Felix, friends Jude, Eva, and Jasper quit being firefighters and work at a shopping mall in Portland. Their coping mechanisms and grief drive them down different paths: Eva is the mall superintendent and focused on the future; Jasper changes personas like he's trying to live every kind of life while running a cross between a thrift store and little shop of horrors; and Jude fancies himself a good mall cop and a vampire hunter seeking justice for Felix's death. And then in drops Pixie, a newly turned vampire who wants to escape his creator and get the older vampires to stop bullying him.

So yeah, there's a lot going on. Sylver's serial fiction is highly character-driven, and each person feels fully formed on the page, even if they don't let the reader in on their secrets. We learn the most about Jude, who is the POV character, but each character's arc is so realized that it feels like any of them could have told the story. The conflicts and plot feel organic, and the fact that I could guess the end twist doesn't bother me so much. The Portland setting feels uncanny and spooky, friendly and unfriendly all at once. As other reviewers have noted, mental health, death, grieving, consent, and (romantic) friendship are big, well-developed themes.

This love of character and theme is all well and good, but unfortunately, and I can already feel a flush of embarrassment crawling up my neck, I didn't like Jude. Who is the POV character. Who we learn the most about. And spend the most time with. After a certain point of Jude being Jude, the story tanked for me.

I can't decide whether Jude is too much like me and my disaster of a self, or too opposite of me and my remaining logos functionality. Jude says he goes out nightly to hunt vampires. There's pages and pages of talk about how to properly deal with trauma and facing truth. This gave me the impression that Jude knew what he was doing. He talks a big game, says he's done research. I believed him.

Reader, he does not know what the f*ck he is doing. He freezes mid-vampire attack not once, but three times. The writing yanks itself into an entire PTSD flashback mid-action scene. Before the final battle, as it were, Jude makes a huge deal about getting the key to the tunnels, how he might not come back alive, but then arms himself with blood-laced steak sauce and nothing else! Another character comes onto the scene who plainly knows what she is doing, and Jude has the utter gall to question her at every turn.

It was too much for me. I'm unsure if Jude's recklessness was meant as PTSD symptoms because he also about wallowed in how "well" he faced the trauma of Felix's death. There's facing fears and then there's facing fears unprepared and getting murdered. You don't do the later, let alone repeat the later, and claim any mental wellness. His audacity ran into the Green Principle, where I start losing sympathy with a character if they're too much of an idiot. In addition to the Green Principle activating, a mysterious character's name is accidentally revealed in narration and a non-Catholic character receives hand wounds and repeatedly calls them Stigmata wounds. The book lost me there.

While reading, I could tell Sylver wrote the piece to dwell on themes and the characters, particularly the disability, ace/aro, polyam, gay, and transgender representation. Whatever else I think about the story, I know that the rep and themes of the work are important to a lot of people, and I wouldn't want to change those aspects. My reaction to Jude and my disappointment over other details don't take away from the other good writing going on in Stake Sauce. Jude's not my cup of tea, but I'm looking forward to Moon-Bright Tides, which I also have on my Kindle. While I'm not going to recommend Stake Sauce to everyone, I will recommend it to everyone thirsty for good queer representation. That's where the story shines.

Moon-Bright Tides caught my eye when it first came out because I am an absolute sucker for magical creature kissing. When Sylver and the Kraken Collective offered a free download to celebrate #MerMay, I jumped at the chance and was absolutely thrilled.

Quite short page-wise, Moon-Bright Tides is a lovely tale placed firmly as one of Sylver's "oddly optimistic dystopia books," as she describes them in her author bio. Humanity exploded the moon, and this catastrophe has caused a lot of problems. For instance, without the moon, the ocean's tides are kaput, and it has fallen to a family of witches to magically move the ocean's currents. Riven, the last member of this family, hates this task. Going out in the pitch midnight dark in a small coracle to sing a mournful song is creepy af and triggers nightmares of the time she almost drowned. One night, however, she returns from her woeful errand to find a starving mermaid on her doorstep. Driven as much by compassion as her own desperate loneliness, Riven feeds, befriends, and cares for the mermaid, named Moonbright, until friendship becomes something more.

See what I mean? It's a love story right smack in the middle of ecological disaster, almost a soft apocalypse. Sylver's writing glows with grief and healing, with beautiful descriptions of the darker, oceanic world Riven and Moonbright inhabit. For those who follow Sylver's serial fiction Stake Sauce, many similar themes are explored here: overcoming trauma, consent, body image, found family, redemption, mental illness, and queer experiences to name a few. Despite the grim setting, Riven and Moonbright's relationship left me a gooey, happy mess from the fluff. For romance readers wondering, the physical intimacy doesn't go beyond attraction, sensuality, and kissing. Sylver focuses much more on the emotional aspect of her protagonists' relationship, and this suited me wonderfully and certainly did not cause me to almost cry in a coffee shop. Why do you ask?

I 100% recommend Moon-Bright Tides to all humans and merfolk. Read it to be comforted and to find a soft glow of happiness in troubled times.

I heard about Roan Parrish's masterpiece through Twitter and was excited to read it from the first. Well, I finally did, and the experience was a little more mixed than I thought it would be.

The Remaking of Corbin Wale tells the romance of baker Alex Barrow and the titular Corbin. After he loses his NYC job and boyfriend in the space of a week, Alex decides to move back to his family home in Michigan before a piano drops on him (his words, not mine, and they made me laugh). Since his mother wants to retire their family's coffee shop anyway, Alex takes it over and reopens the place as And Son bakery. Once And Son opens, in steps Corbin, a local part time worker and loner, and the pair feel an instant connection. The bulk of the novel is spent with Alex getting Corbin to open up and Corbin putting several personal demons to rest so he can be with Alex.

The writing is drop-dead gorgeous: powerful, ethereal, and strange to create the perfect atmospheric mood for the piece. The story danced lovingly on the tipping point of melancholic and warm. The descriptions of characters, settings, and baking were mouth-watering and lavish. The slow burn romance between Alex and Corbin was incredibly satisfying. A subplot emerges with Alex's best friend Gareth coming to town to escape an abusive relationship, and it was rewarding in its own right (and possibly sequel worthy?). The rep is pleasantly diverse: Alex's family is Jewish, Corbin was raised ambiguous pagan, and several of the characters are of color. Before the ending, I was ready to give the story five stars.

Parrish went to great lengths to root this story among the in-between space of realism and magical realism. Perhaps a little too in-between for me. We're given hints that Alex may have siren or Pied Piper-esque persuasive powers, while Corbin believes he has a family curse and shares a lot of characteristics with changelings. Parrish immediately shrugs these ideas off as frameworks to understand Corbin's unusual childhood and Alex's charismatic personality. In literature, magic and magical creatures are ciphers and frameworks after all, and it's suggested that Corbin is using them to process his trauma and loneliness. However, I think the timing was off for me. Because from the beginning I knew this universe didn't have magic, Corbin's efforts to rid himself of the family curse felt...silly? Not exactly silly, but the tone switched from being with Corbin and to more looking outside him, pitying the "poor traumatized man" who was transfixed by a self-delusion. As a mentally ill person myself, the pitying fascination made me uncomfortable. The intersection of mental illness/trauma and magical powers is a contested one, and I don't think Parrish quite pulled it off here. The story might have gone better as straight up magical realism.

My other quibble is equally personal in nature and may not bother other readers. The poetic language has a delightful focus on the natural world, which I like, but extended to sex, which caused me to panic about drowning and being buried alive in beach sand. I had a weird feeling that Corbin and Alex could be replaced by women and be exactly the same: during the sex scene, I was especially thrown out of the story by the use of the word "quake" because I have literally only seen it in wlw fiction before this. Ultimately gender is pointless, we need to destroy the binary etc etc, but this lack of masculine feel may be why I don't see a lot of mlm reviewing this book.

All and all, while I'm not bouncing up and down in delight, I respect Roan Parrish as an artist with brilliant wordcrafting skills. I'll be interested in what she does next with such honed, lovely talent and recommend The Remaking of Corbin Wale to fantasy romance fans trying to get into contemporary or vice versa.