In short, THIS WAS SO BEAUTIFUL! We follow our main character, Mags, as she struggles with a dark family secret that she must keep to herself to protect everyone around her. This burden, however, keeps her from getting close with anyone outside of her sick abuela. Mags juggles school, work, helping her mama care for her abuela, and spending nights in her abuela’s basement taking care of some unnamed monster. When a childhood friend, Nessa, shows back up in town after years away, her whole world is flipped upside down. She starts attending parties, spending more time outside of her abuela’s house (which is out of the norm for her), and she must ultimately come face-to-face with the monster she’s been avoiding. In order to live her life, she must embrace every part of herself with open arms.

DNF @ Ch. 42
It’s hard for me to be engaged with the storyline right now. I think if I tried to read this again after some time away, I might like it. But for now, it’s taking me entirely too long to read it. 

We revisit our beloved robot Roz as she’s off on her next adventure away from her island home. She’s made it through factory repairs and arrives at a family farm to start her new job as a farmhand. She pretends to be a standard run of the mill ROZZUM unit, but she secretly befriends the farm animals and quickly begins plotting to run away and return to her island home. What she wasn’t anticipating was caring deeply for her new employer and his family as if they were her own.

THE FINAL BOOK! The Tensorate series has been such an enjoyable ride. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: Yang does an excellent job of telling an epic series of stories in different styles. This book closes our series with a deep-dive into the Lady Han’s backstory as told by the Lady Han, herself. We learn about her upbringing, about her relationship with the Protector, and how everything went downhill to where we left the war between the Machinists and the Protectorate. ALL IN FIRST PERSON. Again, I can’t get enough of Yang’s storytelling styles in this series!

A boy found on the moon, lives with his adopted mother in a space colony until she marries someone on New Earth and their family of 2 grows by 3. Indu must learn to navigate a new culture, language, and an all too-familiar feeling of loneliness. Queer-normative (so many wonderfully queer and trans characters!!), emotional, and absolutely beautiful. The artwork alone is enough reason for anyone to pick up this one!

If you’ve never read a series by Seanan McGuire, but you love complex worldbuilding, rich characters and settings, and extremely creative storylines: the Alchemical Journeys series just might be for you. The basic premise is that alchemists have found a way to physically embody concepts like Language and Math. They’ve been successful a few times, but we’ve since learned that there are more entities (the seasons, gods/goddesses, etc.) that have manifested naturally. If you’ve followed along in the series until now, you’ll be delighted to see some familiar faces from previous books and a handful of new faces that will capture readers’ hearts instantly.

We start by meeting manifestations of moon goddesses who make a journey across the sky as the moon each night (with a killer view of the Impossible City). There have been a lot of mysterious deaths of these manifestations lately and no one can figure out who’s responsible. Judy, a manifestation of Chang’e, partners with two other god/desses to figure out what’s happening. Along the way, she meets our group of alchemical creations, human friends, and another creation from the alchemists’ secret lab. They must all join forces to solve this slew of mysterious deaths before the alchemists claim another victim.

If you’ve kept up with the Alchemical Journeys, I also recommend The Up-And-Under series published under McGuire’s pseudonym A. Deborah Baker. The tales in these four novellas are known in the world of the Alchemical Journeys as children’s stories written by Baker, a famous alchemist. While it’s not required reading to enjoy this series, the information is definitely fun bonus content for a richer worldbuilding experience.

Mostly fiction, small part memoir/love letter to their wife, Muniz weaves a beautiful tale of a kingdom where a woman who does not want to marry must completely upend her life and become Count Camembert to inherit her father’s fortune after his untimely passing. What was supposed to be a quiet, secluded life turns out to be so much more once she’s introduced to the Princess Brie. This story is SO CUTE, loosely based on the author and their wife, everything is named after cheese, and the shared love of grilled cheese changes lives. What’s not to love about this graphic novel??

A stunning and beautiful memoir about the author’s gender journey. This graphic novel sheds light and color on the challenges and multiple beautiful moments as they navigate what it means to be at home in their body and let the truest version of themself shine. 10/10 would recommend to anyone who is curious about gender identity (whether they’re on their own journey or supporting a loved one) and anyone who’s craving positive, enthusiastic queer and nonbinary representation. I cried.

Our main character, Roz, was born on this island - she has been there her entire life. She learned to navigate dangerous terrain, avoid bears who attacked her, and eventually how to understand and speak the languages of all the creatures on the island. Roz is also a robot and was part of a large shipment of robots that crashed onto the island’s shores after a powerful storm. In short, she does not belong here, but she has learned to adapt.

Readers witness as Roz acclimates and rises to every challenge the island offers her, even becoming a mother, when the opportunity presents itself. Her relationships with the island critters start off rocky, but as they start to realize Roz is not a threat, they warm up to her and appreciate her for the talents she brings to their community. This first book explores loneliness, the changing nature of friendship, sacrifice, community, motherhood, and family dynamics that are outside the “norm.” Brown explores all of these themes and works through this range of emotions with tact and care. I absolutely cannot wait to pick up the second book in the series to see what adventures Roz encounters next!

Thank you to Edelweiss and Redhook for letting me read an e-ARC of Goddess of the River by Vaishnavi Patel! This book releases on May 21st, so you have just enough time to preorder a copy or request it from your local library to celebrate. If you read Patel’s debut novel, Kaikeyi, and loved it - you’ll want to get your hands on this one!

Let me start by saying that this was my first encounter with the contents of the Mahabharata, so I had no prior knowledge of the subject matter, stories, and deities within this book or its original source material. Patel, however, does an amazing job of arranging her retellings of Indian myths and legends with great care and research that shines through her finished texts. For any portion of the storytelling that I found tricky to keep up with (multiple names and titles, timelines, knowledge of Indian mythos), I still found it easy enough to piece together the narrative and comprehend the big picture story by its conclusion. Similar to Kaikeyi, Goddess of the River explores motherhood, the struggle of dharma, war, and the concept of family by introducing fantastical elements (the river Ganga’s powers in her immortal form) and by holding up a magnifying glass to a few threads in the massive tapestry that is the Mahabharata.

We follow the river Ganga as she is cursed to take on a mortal form, and bear 7 children and release them to the immortal realm before she can return to her immortal river state. She successfully weds the raja, Shantanu, and bears 6 children (returning them to her river with increasing sadness and grief), but fails to release her 7th and final child back to where he belongs. Having fulfilled the terms of the curse (bearing 7 children), she becomes the river Ganga once more, but is now forced to watch her son, Devavrata, grow up from afar. Tragedy ensues over the coming decades as her son refuses the throne and sends the kingdom into a whirlwind as the family decides who should be heir, if not him. Family in-fighting begins and it all goes downhill from there, as the predicted war comes to pass by the end.

Don’t forget to check The StoryGraph for content warnings, though Patel also includes this.