This was a quick read, but a lovely one. Ostertag’s style is extremely charming and lively, and Morgan and Keltie have good chemistry together, with some really touching moments between them. Morgan’s own internal struggles with her sexuality, family relationships, and friendships, were sensitively and realistically portrayed. The bittersweet ending was a fantastic note to end on: Ostertag grounds the fanciful idea of falling in love with a selkie in modern, everyday concerns with a genuine voice which makes the characters feel all the more real. Like a few other reviewers have mentioned, I found the pacing a little abrupt, in places, but it by no means significantly detracts from an extremely enjoyable reading experience: The Girl from the Sea is well-worth reading.

As someone that reads a lot of fiction aimed at younger audiences, I was excited by the prospect of a book for young readers tackling the lockdown, but I foud myself pretty thoroughly disappointed by this read.

Max’s daily routine in lockdown was undeniably pretty dull, and it felt like even the writer knew it– having one’s protagonist repeatedly break in to admit that a book about wizards would probably be way more interesting reeks so strongly of authorial insecurity, I’m sure that I’d have picked it up on it even if I was of-age with the target audience. A lot of the humour throughout this book is similarly flat, and Max’s voice doesn't feel authentically childlike.

The most pressing issue, undeniably, was Williams shying away from tackling the pandemic thoroughly, in a way that condescended to that target audience. I have a family member who was the same age as Max when the pandemic began, and couldn’t help but feel that this couldn’t be further from her experience: of news, truthful or otherwise, spreading like wildfire on the playground, of the paralyzing uncertainty, of the new sacredness of evenings spent gaming with friends. It’s more than three quarters through Max Counts To a Million before anyone even mentions that it’s possible to die of Covid, and the possibility is whisked away almost as quickly as it’s presented. This strikes me as babying an audience who knew very well the danger the pandemic could pose, many of whom were forced to confront that danger head-on when they, or someone they knew, lost a loved one. Max doesn’t seem to have any anxieties at all, but will occasionally declare that he is. I wasn't convinced that he ever worried that his Dad, a doctor called into hospital, would catch Covid. I had no idea what parts of school he missed most, or which people. For me, it just didn’t feel like a genuine, empathetic depiction of the experience as it was for children who went through it.

I can’t help but wonder what an author like Jacqueline Wilson might do with the pandemic as a backdrop. I find myself confident she’d be a lot more honest. I was hoping to recommend this book- I know how validating and cathartic it can be to come upon a lived experience, faithfully fictionalised. This is not that book.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a nice concept, but ultimately not particularly well-executed. I can imagine it was much more effective as the stage-play it was adapted from. I’m unsure if it was a facet of the translation, or the original text, but the writing felt extremely clinical, and I was unable to become emotionally invested in any of the characters. Despite the shortness of this novel, there’s also a lot of unnecessary repetition, which I think might be a relic from its previous medium.

The female characters felt particularly flat, revolving mostly around the men in their lives, and their roles as wives and mothers. As other people have observed, there’s a highly conservative undertone in each “lesson,”- women mostly come away from their time travel experiences feeling that they should sacrifice their independence and personal goals. This was an extremely uncomfortable trend, and was also gratingly heavy-handed, and it definitely felt like the writer was up on a soapbox more than once.

This is a fairly quick read, and given how popular it’s remained over the last few years, I’m happy to have read it just so that I can form an opinion on it, but I couldn’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone else. I struggled to find a reason to give it two-stars, but ultimately, I couldn’t remember anything I liked about this book enough to justify it.

P.S. If you know me, you know nothing annoys me more than contradictory, poorly-considered time travel rules. I was extremely hopeful when the rules were set out, but then they were violated anyway. This is more of a pet peeve than anything else, but I know it’s not exclusive to me, so if it’s something that bothers you too, you might not want to pick up this book.

I like to pick up the occasional biography on someone I know next to nothing about, so I came to To Be A Gay Man without any prior affection for Young. Listening to his brave and candid voice in the audiobook, he definitely grew on me, and I found this read to be occasionally funny, and sometimes relatable- but ultimately, I found myself wondering who it was for, and what exactly Young was trying to say. At times, it seems like Young is trying to address fellow members of the LGBTQIA+ community who have suffered similar feelings of shame, and might be facing parallel mental health struggles– and then he'll turn around and define bisexuality. I didn’t get the feeling that a cishet reader would walk away from this read having learned to empathise with the struggles of the community, but I’m cheered to see some reviews from readers who have apparently had that experience. Ultimately, this just felt like a slightly meandering experience to me, though it was engaging enough, and like it could have benefitted from some further refinement.

In many ways, the Starlight Watchmaker was an incredibly enjoyable read. Despite the novella format, James manages to establish a compelling, inventive world that truly lives and breathes. I adored its creativity of it, and how seamlessly it was woven into the mystery. A couple of my favourite elements included the clockwork moths Hugo, the titular watchmaker, uses to illuminate his work, the books concealed inside plants, and the alien who was herself a future planet. It was whimsical and fantastical, and it made me really want to return to the world.

Hugo and Dorian are the only two characters we really have time to explore, but both are hugely likable and their blossoming relationship is genuinely touching. Though a huge rift exists between them in terms of privilege and experience, both have the opportunity to learn from each other as they unravel the mystery of Dorian’s broken watch- their relationship feels mostly like it’s on equal footing. It’s quite impressive for them to go, entirely believably, from animosity to friendship in the space of just a hundred pages.

However, despite all that I liked about this novel, the overall message really ruined the read for me- spoilers to follow from this point.

The Starlight Watchmaker introduces us to a world where androids are essentially a slave race, purchased by organic individuals, and often abandoned when the next model comes along. James paints a landscape of systematic disadvantage, with outdated androids struggling to find employment whilst being punished by the system for their unemployed status. The resolution to this conflict is that the protagonists recognise the latent skills of the outdated androids, and more job opportunities are created for them, so they can be employed again.

This is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, the fact that this suggestion comes from the protagonists- specifically from Dorian, who had known about the android’s plight for all of five minutes- undermines their own independence and intelligence. It seems ludicrous that they wouldn’t have thought of this solution themselves. Perhaps it would have worked more smoothly if they knew their own skills, but needed Dorian to exercise his privilege and talk the administration into giving them a chance. Secondly, it obscures the actual issue- abandoned, jobless androids should not be struggling to survive regardless of their employment status. On a planet where students are able to live luxuriously, it’s utterly immoral that androids have been forced to live underground, slowly perishing without access to the stellar power that keeps them alive.

The parallels between this conflict and countless people’s real-world struggles are uncomfortably impossible to ignore. The result is a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” message that falls incredibly flat. I couldn’t bring myself to smile over a happy ending that involves the androids teaching the very population that threw them away, just to be afforded the necessities that had been denied to them. A person should not have to be useful- and especially, they should not have to be useful to the upper class- to earn the right to survive. I’m sure this message wasn’t James’ intention- I suspect that the moral just wasn’t sufficiently thought out. But the utter injustice of the ending of this novella, framed as a triumph, did ultimately spoil this read for me, hence my rating.

I was so intrigued by the concept of The Couple, and ultimately so disappointed by the clumsy execution. Coming in from reading mostly science-fiction and fantasy, I was expecting some thoughtful worldbuilding in this book– some genuine speculation about what a culture that normalises singleness would look like. What I found was incredibly shoddy and underdeveloped. For instance, there’s a couple in this book who are coparenting their child, much to the horror of their community, and their child is bullied as a result. For this reason- and this reason only- want to take a drug to deaden their romantic feelings for one another, but no-one thinks to points out that, drug or none, people will still think they’re romantically involved if their living arrangement doesn’t change. This is a fairly tame example, but there was such a long list of issues here that they repeatedly snapped my immersion like a twig.

Acton tries to execute a commentary on society’s obsession with hetereosexual coupling and nuclear families here. Tries, being the keyword. It’s almost incomprehensible to me that a book where couples are discriminated against, and casual hookups are the social norm somehow manages to come off as, for lack of a better term, “slut-shamey,” judgemental, and frankly sexist. Millie’s constant derision for the lifestyle of one of her sexually active coworkers makes her an extremely unlikeable protagonist, and that coworker is written as a complete cipher, hypersexual, shallow, and cutthroat, to try and get the reader to side with Millie. It’s completely juvenile, and very disappointing. Indeed, all the characters who are suited to the single lifestyle are, in some way, condemned by the narrative, which is deeply irritating.

It’s difficult not to see the anti-couple society this novel is set in through the lens of allegory, particularly when one of Millie’s close friends and co-workers, is in a marginalised committed relationship with another woman. As a queer person reading this book, the medication that suppresses romantic love feels obviously reminiscent of real-life forms of conversion therapy. So, when Millie’s co-worker

Spoiler

quits over their company’s distribution of it- and Millie has the audacity to be angry at her, because they had “promised to stay coworkers,” I was shocked, but hopeful Millie would realise her mistake, and apologise. But no– her co-worker ends up apologising *to her.* .

This incident, for me, sums up the general lack of thought Acton has exercised in writing this book. If you're looking for enaging speculative fiction, keep looking. This is a romance in an interesting hat.

Speaking of the romance under the hat, if there was nothing else about this book, to my surprise, I found I kind of liked Ben. I have a– perhaps inaccurate– perception that the male love interest in most romance novels is insanely hot, stoic, and hypermasculine. Ben is none of these things, but he is genuinely charming and funny, and Millie’s attraction to him makes sense. I just wish she had been a more bearable protagonist, so I that could root for them more.

I picked this up at random, and a couple of the poems did bring a smile to my face, but unfortunately, McGough falls back on transphobic "humour" at times– a real shame, considering he clearly has the ability to write genuinely funny poems. My personal favourites were the ones themed around the elements that are clustered at the end of the book. Ultimately though, this was a pretty forgettable collection, and I wouldn’t be compelled to seek out more of his work.

Gender: A Graphic Guide really pleasantly surprised me! Not only is it a great introduction for someone completely unfamiliar with this topic, with accessible language and great explanations of essential terminology, I was excited to find I learned something knew from this book, even as a trans person who has spent a fair amount of time thinking about gender, sex, patriarchy, gender presentation– all that fun stuff, and it helped me put the words to a couple of ideas I couldn’t have concretely explained before. I picked this up purely out of curiosity, but I feel like I now have a recommendation I can point anyone who is looking to learn more about gender to, which is pretty fantastic. I did have some problems with the formatting, as I read an e-book version of this, so if you can track down a physical copy, I'd recommend that.

The Burning Dark was an uphill battle, to say the least; I confess I’m surprised I finished it.

Every little twist was so clearly signposted, you could see it from… well, from space, which was perhaps its biggest sin, and undercut any tension Christoper was trying to build. This wasn't helped at all by the problem of repetitive prose. Beyond the predictability, the characters felt largely flat and tropey, and it was difficult to get invested in them as a result. Despite coming in at 336 pages and making a “valiant,” attempt to include female characters (in the form of the not-like-other-girls action-chick, and…

Spoiler

the villain

) I’m pretty confident that it somehow fails to pass the Bechdel test. It's also, regrettably, one of those books where at times, it seems like the characters are acting stupidly and overlooking the obvious. This is explained away with in-universe reasons, but it makes for a deeply frustrating reading experience and definitely felt like an excuse for the characters to continue to act conveniently for the plot, as opposed to in accordance with sense, which was a pretty great way to break immersion.

I’ve found myself with a growing fondness for horror and suspense-oriented fiction set in space, and it’s a niche with a fair amount of competition. To be blunt, I think this particular title is easily outcompeted.

On a final, spoilery note, I appreciate that much modern horror is inspired by

Spoiler

Japanese folklore, but the way that Izanami’s racial features are stressed with regard to her role as the villain just didn’t sit quite right with me. I don’t have Japanese heritage, so I wouldn’t be comfortable making a judgment on this, but especially with the majority of the cast being white, it certainly rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe another Japanese member of the crew would have offset that weirdness?

McLemore is on form here, with their signature spellbinding prose, genuine characters, and imaginative takes on classic magical tropes.

My full thoughts are available to listen to in an episode of The Hidden Bookcase