THIS IS SO BEAUTIFUL. 

If you want a story filled with Korean mythology and an enemies-to begrudging allies-to-lovers romance, READ THIS. It’s got grumpy x (murderous) sunshine, humor, witty banter, divine consequences… I can and will go on and on, but for now I have to read the next book. 

Eventually I’ll come back and lengthen this review. 

For now: know that they begin their relationship on the opposite sides of a love for coffee, and that

Suk Aeri being the gossip columnist tormenting Seokga

is the funniest twist of all time. 

A Forgery in Fate is a beautiful new novel from Elizabeth Lim, twisting the traditional Beauty and the Beast story into something gloriously draconic. 

Truyan lost her father to the sea five years ago. She, her two sisters, and her mother, are in dire straits-- all lost to their grief and to the cruelty of fate, landing them in a debt so damning it nearly ruins all hope of escape. Tru has been forging paintings for years, scraping together money for them to find her father's homeland, or to anywhere better than their current situation. Then her mother's debt collectors come calling, demanding a ridiculous repayment that the sale of no ordinary painting could pay back. As she and her family desperately attempt to escape the clutches of the crime lord responsible, Tru is inadvertently thrust into the garden--and the life--of the infamous Demon Prince who lives on the town's wealthiest street. In exchange for the safety of her family and for wealth that could catapult them back into security, the Prince asks Tru for her assistance in one mission: to use the magic of her painting to rid the underwater realm of its tyrannical ruler, the Dragon King.

Ohhhhhh how I love this book. The characters and their circumstances are so well articulated, and the desperation and grief they harbor so real. Even if we do enter knowing that certain things are to be expected due to its inspiration, a vivid world bursts into life in a way that still had me questioning what elements were red herrings, what was a deliberate signal to readers, and certainly left me starving for more. 

If you're looking for a gorgeous, Asian-inspired twist on a classic fairytale or simply looking for a rich new world to step into, filled with characters that are easy to love (or hate, in some cases), this is a perfect book to quench your thirst.

So many thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Books for Young Readers for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review!

Can I give this book more than five stars?

I knew well before it came out that I’d love Rachel Gillig’s next book, and yet I was wholly unprepared for this one. 

Reduced to a number and the holy order to Divine, Six is one of six women, Diviners, bound to the grounds of Aisling Cathedral, overseen by the Abbess and forced to drown and to dream for any who come to seek portents of their futures. One day, Six’s sister Diviners begin disappearing. Knowing something has gone wrong, she calls upon the knight she recently met at the new boy-king’s divination she performed… and quickly learns the world she’s been kept from is far more harrowing than the one she’s known. 

This story kept me on the edge of my seat. The main character is such a force, both physically and mentally strong in the wake of her lifelong beliefs crashing down around her. Her malapropism-mired gargoyle companion provides both heart and comic relief. The FMC’s knight is her perfect foil, goading and guiding her along the journey with roguish charm. All the characters feel rooted and real, truly coming to life on the page. Similarly, the world itself, with another incredible, unique magic system crafted of Gillig’s brilliance, is vibrant and yet dark and full of questionable certainties and misunderstood terrors. 

The only thing I’ll say against it is that the cliffhanger is unbearable. Which is simultaneously the highest praise I can offer a cliffhanger. It just makes me crazy, even if the hints of what was to come had been slowly making themselves known for a while. I still didn’t fully see it coming, and I wait with bated breath for the next book. 

🌶️

Blaze was born wrong. And the entire world blames her for it. 
Upon her birth, a terrible storm decimated the world around her, with thousands left dead. She is the Storm Weaver, inheriting a legacy of a people long thought lost. And despite her being a newborn when the storm came, everyone hates her for the destruction her birth caused. She's been hidden away for her entire life, when, shortly after the celebration of her and her twin brother Flint's 17th Name Day, they both get selected to become Heirs--candidates for royal leadership to serve the Emperor, sentenced to compete in three trials that could kill them, or condemn them. 

I'm going to stop there, because there's so much incredible story that I don't want to risk giving away, but... holy crap. This was so good. I cannot wait for the next book. 

I was enchanted with this book from the first sentence. The characters are fleshed out and grounded, and the magic of the world somehow feels both like old hat and entirely unexpected. There are a lot of fantasy books out there that feature games or trials, and plenty with elemental powers, as well. Somehow this book made both tropes feel new again. The nuances to the elemental courts' powers, which I'm sure we'll get further into with the books to come in the series, are really interesting. The lore of the world itself is so clearly full of mystery and there is so much more to learn. I feel like I can anticipate some of what's to come, but we only get teases of possibilities. It's both the best and the worst, as all I want to do is read the next installment.

I'm so excited to delve into this world more with the next book. Even with a young protagonist, she's been through enough that it's clear she has a more mature angle on the world around her, and I think is as prepared as anyone can be for whatever insanity is waiting around the corner. I'm so excited to be waiting with her.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Roaring Book Press for an digital ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review!

This is possibly one of the most beautiful short stories I’ve ever read.

I wish I had the proper words to describe the experience of reading it; El-Mohtar’s prose flows like the river it sings tell of, shaping the world and characters with words that somehow possess an inexplicable magic. The grammar provides both a confusion and a mystical source to the piece, though I still can’t fully understand or explain its role. The beauty in the Professors, the Liss, the Refrain… it all blends into this lyrical wisp of a realm that I both wish I knew better and am blissfully satisfied by my short journey within. 

See? Reading this story is making me write more poetically (albeit in my case, also nonsensically). It feels like a glimpse into an unknown reality the reader is merely offered a crumb of, but for our own benefit, lest we get trapped within the timeless vortex of words. 

Long story short, if you like fantastical but beautiful worldbuilding, themes of sisterly love, a hefty dash of wordplay and enjoy the idea of a pun saving the day, read this gorgeous book. I’m so, SO glad I did. 

Lark Goode and her brother live alone in their rundown house built above the river in Cutwater. Abandoned by their parents, they face the end of their senior year of school, and Lark looks to a future as far away from home as possible. Their family has been cursed since their ancestor stole tulips from Holland and planted a garden of them that lies next to their house to this day. All the Goodes become irresistible to everyone around them when the tulips bloom, and resume their lives as outcasts once the season changes. Until the last week of school, where Lark meets a boy who somehow resists her unwanted charms. 

First off, I have to say that this book is beautifully written. The prose is poetic and evocative. The story is emotional and heart-wrenching. The concept is fascinating: a family cursed for generations to be loved and yet unlovable. But there is also the incredibly fleeting nature of love and reality within the book that, rather than infusing the text with discernible lessons from the fantastical world, somehow  cheapens the story in its conclusion. It could be a love-conquers-all tale, or one about the futility and inability to pin down love, especially in one's youth. But it ends with a whimper, and left me entirely unsatisfied. 

The conclusion is still beautifully written, and akin to a fable, but the lesson doesn't take. The main character's choices lose all their weight in the final pages.

Lark choosing a fake love that she spends the entire story trying to escape makes absolutely no sense. All her ideals and protestations about how she won't accept anything else but a love she can discern for herself fall flat when she clings to the last petal.

It felt like I was cheated out of some beautiful, if not heartbreaking, lesson at the end of it. The relationship itself also proceeded so quickly that it felt unearned. Perhaps it's part of the point, that the curse wends its way through the lives of the Goodes in ways that never end. And the ambiguity could be there to punctuate that in the end, but I still feel like we never get a proper resolution.

All that said, I’m really glad I got to experience this emotive story. If you like flowing prose, an exploration of whether we determine our own fates, and are interested in the not-so-HEAs, I’d suggest trying this one!

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review!

Luna, a half-fae making a living by bartending at a friend's bar and doing the groundskeeping for her estranged father's inn, suddenly gets her life turned upside down when her nasty boss at said inn up and quits in frustration that the inn never receives any guests. Her father now gives her an ultimatum: run the inn and fill it with guests by the month's end, or he'll sell the one place she can call home. 

Meanwhile, Vincent, a son of a rigid old fae court making a living by writing a recommendation column in the local paper, is desperate to start writing more important pieces. When the opportunity to do just that falls into his lap, he's eager to look into the potential corruption of a member of a rival court-- who happens to be Luna's father.

Dealing with their new realities, Luna and Vincent strike up a deal: she'll help him gain access to her father's house to investigate his piece, and he'll write a recommendation for her inn, which will all but guarantee that it'll be bursting with guests in no time. Naturally, there are a few roadblocks to working together... most notably, their incredible attraction to each other.

This was such a sweet, delightful detour of a book! Perhaps because of the setting, reading it felt like sipping tea while sitting by the fire at a small hotel in an unusual but endearing town. It was easy to get through, and a wonderful distraction from the heaviness of some of the other books I've read lately. While I do wish we'd gotten a bit more conflict in the book to make the ending feel more earned, I had a great time. The solutions do come easy to our main characters, and we don't get a huge amount of depth to them, but what we do learn allows the reader to become invested in them taking their own power back from those who have only sought to cage them in the past. It's lighthearted, but sometimes that's what you really need. 

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Victory Editing for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review!

The premise is absolutely fascinating: at some point in a reality alternate to ours, doors appear out of nowhere in various places in the world. They lead to strange new worlds entirely unlike anything anyone has ever seen... and they call to some people. These doors slowly become a part of society: as a site of pilgrimage and central to their own religion, as a presumed hoax, as a heretical deviance in nature. Twins Ayanna and Olivia are born into a split world: their father a member of the religion of the doors, and their mother a devout Catholic. At the dissolution of their parents' marriage, they live separately and evolve into two funhouse mirrors of each other: similar in appearance and design, but their view of the world around them skewed in harshly differing ways. 

Ayanna is the focus of the book, growing up with the doors as some sort of nonsensical but benevolent entity, the focus of her father's religion. When she comes of age, their practice involves a grounding ritual of self-acceptance that allows individuals to walk through the door. Due to the divergent nature of the fates of those who have attempted to enter previously, it is very much a leap of faith. Olivia, having grown up with their rigid mother, comes to support her sister--and makes a decision that  alters their entire family's lives irreparably. 

Going into the book, I didn't quite expect such an emphasis on religion and religious philosophy. While I generally don't have an issue with either subject, I tend to find them to be quite a heavy topic that I can't comfortably deal with for too long. Once I got into part two of the book, Ayanna's mental state deteriorates and the action of the book becomes much more haphazard, jumping around in time in a way I couldn't easily follow and demonstrative of darker thoughts I try to avoid delving into myself. For this reason, I was having a lot of difficulty getting through the book. I will try to return to it at some point, but sadly, it simply isn't for me right now.

If you are ready for a fascinating and philosophical dive into religion, alternate worlds and an exploration into the familial bonds--and trials--of a Black family in the Midwest, try this book out! If you have experienced the loss of a sibling or are sensitive to religious trauma, however, I'd steer clear, as it may evoke some difficult feelings.

Where I currently am, I would give this book between two and a half and three stars.

So much thanks to NetGalley and Amistad for giving me a digital ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!

HOW can Penn Cole do this to us??

The cliffhanger on this one is lethal. 

But the rest of the book is so, so perfect. (Arguably, so is the cliffhanger, but it angers me, so I’m choosing to ignore it). There’s so much more lore about the world we delve into, and so much more character backstory. But that’s all beautifully weaved in to the plot after the intense action starts on page one—and has you in a chokehold for quite a while. 

There’s twists I certainly didn’t expect, and at least one I did. The tension between Luther and Diem is SO THICK but has the best resolution ever

(seriously, it may be the best spicy scene I’ve ever read)

. And now I can’t wait for the next book. I just desperately need it. 

Even though you’re setting yourself up to join the club of cliffhanger-limbo, if you are remotely interested in starting the series… DO IT. It’s truly one of the best things I’ve picked up this year. 

🌶️🌶️🌶️

I knew I was going to love this series, I just didn’t realise quite how much I was going to love it. 

Just like in the first book, the worldbuilding feels natural and unrushed. It is by far one of the best examples of worldbuilding I’ve seen in recent memory, unfolding through character action and discussion rather than infodumping. 

As a result, we learn alongside Diem, our FMC, what being at court as a Descended actually means—and the various ways in which life as one of them is just as damning as being mortal. The grey of the world is masterfully demonstrated as Diem recognizes that nothing is black and white anymore, nor was it at all previously. But this time she’s going to have to make choices that make enemies out of old friends and potential new allies before she even gets recognized fully as the new Crown. 

Basically, this book was amazing. The characters are all vivid, and I have very strong emotional reactions to most of them, which I only take as an excellent sign of quality writing. But the banter? It is off. the. charts. The conversations between siblings, new friends, family members… it’s SO well done. Not that most hold a candle to Luther saying the most profoundly beautiful things, but that’s its own paragraph. Or essay. Yeah, I might have to write an essay on why Luther is Best Boy. There is so much tension that I may snap before anything really happens between him and Diem, and I am eating it up happily. 

On to the next! After which I shall retreat into shadow in anticipation of a release date for Burn.