I’m still not sure if it’s a good idea for me to be reading war novels at the time, but yeah, I’ve picked up another one. While these stories make me angry-sad at the humanity for repeating the same horrors over and over, there’s something almost calming about how they acknowledge those horrors and their evil. Yes, this happened. Yes, this is what people did to each other. Yes, somehow, life went on.

This book is shaped by the intertwining stories of two sisters living through the Nazi occupation/World War 2 in France. The two of them start off as practically polar opposites in how they handle their circumstances. Vianne, the eldest, is already a mother and a responsible member of her community, and her focus is on perseverance. She wants to keep her head low and wait the worst out. Isabelle, on the contrary, is all about defiance. She’s not afraid, she’s angry, and she’s only ever cautious in the sense that she does her best not to betray the resistance she is a part of.

I admit that while Isabelle’s ideals resonated with me deeply, her storyline was hard for me to get into for a large chunk of the book. The way it was written almost clashed with the heavy, real historical backdrop—as if amidst all the regular people suffering, Isabelle was this one special heroine for whom it was all about daring adventure and romance. But as the book progressed, it became clear this was a feature and not a bug, so to speak. The narrative doesn’t specifically frame Isabelle as this YAish heroine; Isabelle does. This is her defense mechanism: reframing horrors as a grand adventure. It helps her for quite a while, and it doesn’t save her at the end, but she sure saves everyone she can reach and is just an amazingly strong character. 

Vianne has her defense mechanisms too, ones initially rooted in conformism and almost-denial. She understands what’s going on, but she needs to survive long enough to reunite with her husband. She has a daughter to take care of. She has her sister with her for a while. She has her charges at school and her friends to look out for, so she tries to play by the new rules. But the rules twist, the game gets darker and darker, and eventually she makes a journey from reluctantly adding the name of her Jewish friend to a list of bad elements to saving Jewish children. Her strength is different from Isabelle’s, quieter and slower to unfold, but evident all the same.

Both of these characters are so vivid, it’s like they were in the room with me as I read, and the same can be said for a lot of others on these pages. I don’t know if I can say I’m glad I’ve read this book; I cried a lot and I’m very angry. But it’s a good one for sure.

It’s been ages since I started and immediately paused this series, so I fully expected to be lost for a while as I reacquainted myself with the characters and the setting. However, it turned out to be surprisingly easy to get back into the swing of things, even though the narrative offers minimal reminders about the events of the previous book. I’m chalking it up to the character work: everyone’s so memorable, it’s impossible to read about them and not recall their past shenanigans. 

Speaking of characters, I really enjoyed the dynamics on the team, especially Amarantha’s banter with Sicarius and how their relationship progressed throughout the book, and absolutely every single scene Books and Maldynado shared. Their sniping at each other is pure gold, I kept laughing out loud at some of the barbs. And really, no matter which characters are involved, most of the dialogues in this novel are brilliant: witty, layered, and pushing forth character development even in the middle of action (which is rather plentiful).

Where the story suffers is the worldbuilding. On one hand, when I realized this wasn’t going to be another urban adventure and we were venturing into the wider world, I was really excited. On the other hand, a wider scope just exemplified how many holes and blind spots there are about… oh, everything. Societal structure, magic, technology—I have so many questions about all of this. And given that the characters’ adventures come with a heavy dose of mystery + they have goals that are all about influencing politics, I feel it would be useful to have some hard rules in place. A better picture of the status quo, the opportunities, the possibilities and impossibilities, for the stakes to feel more real.

Despite the above complaints, it was a one, fast-paced, action-filled romp that put me in a good mood. I love how all the adventurous excitement is combined with character development and the overarching plot keeps me curious!

I absolutely adore this author’s earlier lovecraftian books, so I expected to enjoy this solarpunk/first contact sci-fi, as well. But alas, the deeper I got into the book, the more I felt like I just wasn’t getting it. There were certainly some awesome aspects here! I really liked the first contact part of the story, the aliens, all the things that made them different from humans and all the subtle similarities. The whole thing with how their society treated children was so interesting. The whole discussion about them coming to rescue humanity, and how for some it was an opportunity and for others a threat. All the learning about each other and trying to explain and reconcile different philosophies. Those parts were really interesting to read about, although there was one specific development that came sort of out of the left field for me, but whatever, I think it did its job to convey certain ideas.

But then there was also the state of the Earth, and how humanity got there, and all the different societies, and the differences between watersheds and corporations, and all the gender things, and more. And there was the pretty big cast of characters who all wanted spotlight. And the way it was all brought together—I just kept feeling like I was reading a sequel instead of a stand-alone and felt dreadfully lost. Though of course sometimes I was rescued a bit by the parts that tried to explain the context, but then I had a problem with them, too, because they didn’t seem to fit the narrative naturally. And there were parts that I wanted to linger on, like Judy’s entire family and the relationships within it. There was that one scene focused on a conflict resolution that I was really digging, except for a few small beats that felt kind of preachy. Except all the other plot threads didn’t give it much room to breathe. And there were all those domestic moments focusing on diapers and nursing and whatnot that seemed to be there specifically to showcase the family drama but instead just bogged it down.

As a whole, I feel like this is one of those high-concept stories where characters and events all exist mainly to convey specific ideas, opinions, and thoughts. Except the writing style/approach aimed to be more character-driven, and as a result, for me, the book didn’t quite succeed in either.

Whew. It feels like this book took me an absolute forever. There were parts that I breezed through, but then there were also the parts where every page was a chore, even though I can’t tell I disliked anything in particular. I just… struggled to get to the point and to figure out what to focus on, I guess? I think it had everything to do with the pacing and the abundance of all those fluffy, slice-of-life scenes that did rather little to push the plot forward. I feel like this book could very easily be condensed to ~350 pages, and it still wouldn’t be fast-paced in the slightest. There was just so much meandering, and I even liked some of those parts! All the beautiful descriptions, and family moments, and Kaikeyi’s relationship with her husband and her sister wives, and the slow moving politics—big chunks of those were nice to read and certainly well-written. But the actual plot kept getting lost behind it all.

I suspect that maybe if I had more than a cursory familiarity with the original story (I know the basics, that’s that, and the last time I brushed even on those was back in college) and if I shared the author’s view on most of the characters, I would have been far more satisfied with all that meandering. It probably wouldn’t feel unlike reading a well-written fanfic about your favorite characters, the kind where vibes mean more than plot, and a whole chapter of walking through the gardens trying to learn how to communicate is precisely what you’re after because you just want to hang out with the fictional people you love and you’re all for them getting some peace. But like I’ve said, my familiarity with Ramayana is so-so, and even based on that, I didn’t really agree with the author’s approach to this retelling. Yes, Kaikeyi had her moments of moral grayness, in particular the way she readily influenced others’ opinions and feelings through her magic, but ultimately, it was this simple swap: the good guys are now bad, and the bad guys are now good. Not quite what I look for in antagonist-based retellings.

The prose is definitely great, the characterization is in-depth, and this book even scratched some of the itch left by Madeline Miller’s Circe, at least early on. But I do wish it was a tighter, more focused narrative with less repetition.

Nate is struggling with the transition from a failed eight-years-long relationship to single life and tries not to crush too hard on his allegedly straight best fried Ryder who’s just come back home from an overseas deployment. Ryder, meanwhile, is at the very least bicurious and the only reason he’s never tried anything is because Nate was in a long-term relationship with someone else for most of their twenties. But now they’re both single at the same time, so obviously, it’s time for a drunken first kiss. And then for some actually sober experimentation, intermixed with trying to pretend like no one’s catching feelings.

All of that leads to a fairly short and straightforward friends-to-lovers story. Nothing that I can complain about, but nothing that particularly stood out, either. I wonder if perhaps I should’ve started poking at this series from the first full-length novel, not this prequel novella, because one of my friends has been reccing it to me so enthusiastically, and for now, I just… don’t see the appeal? Like I’ve said, nothing to really complain about, except for maybe some repetitiveness here and there, but I feel like this is just… a very run-of-the-mill rendition of the friends-to-lovers trope with nothing to make it stand out. But maybe if I’d already known the characters from the main series, I would’ve felt differently—that happens!

I feel like the book has never quite come together for me. There are many aspects of it that I liked. Wes and Vincent had a lot of cute moments together. There was some interesting discussion about consent and monstrosity. I really liked the progression of Wes’s feelings, how he started his friendship with Vincent so that he could get his hands on a vampire to bring to the evil pharmaceutical company that probably killed his mom, then developed genuine affection for this specific vampire, but oops, the things with the company were already in motion and it wasn’t possible to just backtrack. There was some really cool tension in the second half of the book over it all, and I liked those tense moments just as much as I enjoyed the various slice-of-life-ish scenes about bonding over videogames and too spicy noodles. Speaking of games, I really liked the sheer nerdiness of the characters. And then there was Wes’s awesome long-distance friendship with Kendall: the strings of messages between them were often great additions to the story, and honestly, everyone needs a friend who will call you out on your shit and push you to make better choices.

So, yeah, a lot of good stuff, but I had so many questions about the worldbuilding around it that it was actually distracting. On one hand, the book is all about the co-existence between vampires and humans, but on the other hand, the vampires’ overall position in the society is soooo unclear. It just keeps boiling down to, “They are very different and keep getting oppressed for it,“ but like, is it a universal situation and does oppression always take the same forms? What about the vampire communities, where are they, how do they function? What is the exact legal status of vampires, are there any regulations around turning people into vampires, what are the laws and regulations about hunting/donor blood? Seems like everyone knows vampires are out there, mostly dislikes them, and also just calmly accepts that one of them might break into anyone’s house in the middle of the night and give you anemia? It all feels like they’ve just recently emerged from the shadows and the world is still adapting, except the book explicitly states it’s been centuries. 

Likewise, the whole situation with Wes’s mom’s disappearance and the plot with the pharm company could use some fleshing out. Especially the company thing. I might look up the reviews for book 2 and see if other readers feel like it was expanded on and resolved more later, then decide based on that if I’m continuing with the series.

A nice, quick read, but I kept wishing it was a full-length novel because a bunch of plot points felt very rushed. I would have appreciated a longer period of enmity/rivalry between the leads and a more gradual switch from that to a mix of friendship and growing longing. I also wouldn’t have minded seeing more instances of Will trying to date through the apps, perhaps comparing and contrasting his experiences with it to his interactions with Ben. And maybe if this was a longer story, Em would have gotten her own arc or at least a personality other than being Will’s trusty sidekick, always putting her actual job on hold, getting out of long-awaited baths, and jolting awake whenever he had a crisis.

On the whole, I really liked Will and found his struggles super relatable. This was such a genuine portrayal of lingering dysphoria and trans-specific insecurities, and I was so happy for his happy ending with Ben. The comedy part of this romcom did fall kinda flat for me, because nearly all the funny scenes came at the cost of Will’s sincere distress and anxiety. Like I was supposed to laugh with him, not at him, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do so, because he’s such a likable and relatable protagonist. Every time, instead of focusing on the humor, I just wanted to take him out of the scene and give him a hug. 

The romance part, despite feeling a bit rushed due to the book’s short length, was pretty great, though. I enjoyed the way the dynamic between the characters evolved, how nice Ben turned out to be, their banter, the fact they’re both dog people, the almost kiss over the comic books, the evening at Ben’s with the tacos, and especially the wonderful Halloween date. They were just so cute together, but at the same time Will’s worries about Ben potentially not accepting him were still logical given his other experiences.

One thing that had me puzzled was the part of the book where

Will saw Ben with a female friend, misread their interaction, and convinced himself for a chapter that Ben was straight despite Ben having sent a bunch of very transparent signals his way already by that point. It was so weird to hear him vent about it to Em, who is openly bisexual, and neither of them even entertaining the possibility that Ben might be bi??? Which he turned out to be, in fact. Like, come on, even if he did have a romantic history with that friend, why would it invalidate all his flirting with Will, it’s not necessarily either/or! He had literally invited Will to kiss him by that point, is that what 100% straight people do?

Idk, something about that particular misunderstanding rubbed me the wrong way, and I generally didn’t feel like this story needed extra misunderstandings. 

Despite the above, I did like the book, and I think I’ll go explore what else the author might have written!

Damn. This was so promising! That in media res opening really hooked me, and also, I listened to this one as an audiobook and the narrator did such a good job with the angry, self-deprecating POV character’s voice. A book with a trans MC, found family, angrily dealing with trauma, standing up to oppression, and deconstructing the fated mates trope sounded amazing. But alas, the further I got into it, the more I felt like the execution of the novel didn’t live up to its amazing potential.

Honestly, this felt very much like an early draft in need of editing. There are numerous sections that read like they were written only as means of figuring out what comes next. Plenty of characters have the exact same shrugging, lip-biting, fangs-gnashing mannerisms. The MC regularly pauses in the middle of dialogue and action to contemplate a bunch of stuff and go off tangent, to the point that I genuinely kept forgetting where the current scene was taking place or what was even happening in it by the time he stopped with the musings. The worldbuilding is full of holes, and the way the fae society functions is more just… a vague collection of ideas that need a lot of thinking through. There was really no need to explicitly spell out that the witches’ position in the fae society is a metaphor for trans/queer kids in the real world. The magic system is all over the place and doesn’t stick to its own rules. All in all, the book feels like someone excitedly telling themself or their closest friends a story, occasionally pausing to insert their own strong opinions in the style of a viral Tumblr post. Which is a perfectly valid state for a book to be in! But, uh, maybe some of this should be fixed before publication.

There *are* things here that I found consistently interesting and promising, but I kept thinking of ways to fix the execution more than I was thinking about the story. Like, we have this premise: Wyatt escaped to the human world years before the book starts, now he’s getting dragged back by his fae prince fated mate. Once there, he gets a proposal from the villain whose beliefs clearly go against Wyatt’s own: make everyone hate you so that the wedding never happens, which would weaken the prince’s position and strengthen the villain. Wyatt wants to go back to the human world and also wants to cause chaos, so he agrees, and some shenanigans do follow—except they feel more like a series of loosely connected vignettes than a plot. Yeah, he does some chaotic stuff. The results of it get promptly fixed with magic, and no one’s opinion on Wyatt or the impending wedding changes much. He doesn’t have any real plans to meet his goal, he just wonders around the plot and makes intentional bad decisions.

Then we’ve got Briar, his best friend from the human world whose parents kind of adopted Wyatt in the backstory. When Emyr appears to drag Wyatt back to Asalin, she allegedly follows because she wants to help Wyatt with his goal of NOT marrying Emyr. But once they’re there, she’s just running around excitedly learning about the new world and nods along whenever the locals talk about Wyatt’s future marriage like it’s set in stone. Does anyone here know how to have consistent agendas??? Though she’s still a way better friend to Wyatt than he is to her.

Speaking of Briar and her parents, I’ve got a lot of questions to them. It was very nice of Briar’s mom to pick up a lonely struggling teen in a library and bring him home (I keep wondering how the family sorted out the legalities around it all, but okay, maybe Wyatt legitimately doesn’t care and doesn’t know). But it sounds like the family just literally tossed this teen into a room with their own teenage daughter and left it up to her to put him together, help him figure himself out, have a short-lived romance with him, become his codependent best friend, try to, in her own words, “be everything he needs her to be,“ etc, etc. Oh, and then they just let the two of them wander off with some winged, horned stranger. I have questions for these adult people. Big questions. Are they even characters, or are they just plot devices existing to make Wyatt and Briar’s story possible?

And the trouble here is, it could be a very good book! Such a good book! There’s SO MUCH potential here if only it got polished. I really loved all the poking at the fated mates trope—some of those moments were the most subtly done, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions, and I really liked how those were written. I liked Wyatt as a character, if not as a person; honestly, his unapologetic, unreserved anger at the trauma he’s faced was refreshing. I liked where his storylines with Emyr and Briar were going, although a lot more was fumbled by the execution here. I liked a lot of the rep. But honestly, if it wasn’t for the audiobook’s narrator being so thoroughly entertaining, I would have DNFed this halfway at best. 

I’m legit not sure if I can produce a coherent review for this one, just as I’m still not sure if it was the right decision for me to read a war novel right now. But I’m kind of glad I did this to myself, because honestly, the book is pretty great. It’s as character-driven as you can get, and the character development is absolutely glorious—both for the two protagonists and the numerous supporting characters around them. Though of course I don’t know if “development“ is the right word, given the circumstances of the plot and the subject matter; more like, the act of breaking the characters down.

The bulk of the story takes part in the trenches and the prisoners of war camp, but there are the early chapters and the occasional flashbacks about the characters’ school days, and damn, do those add to the devastation. It’s just this constant juxtaposition of who these boys were, who they could have been, and who they had to become. I felt it’s particularly evident in Sydney’s arc, with some of the late-book scenes showcasing his worldview and personality traits being literally a dark mirror of similar scenes earlier in the book. And then there’s also Sydney and Henry’s love story developing from those school days through and past all the horrors of war, from juvenile misunderstandings to supporting each other through shell shock, and I can’t really put into words what that development did to me and how unfair the world was to those characters—and how much worth things could turn out to them at any point.

There’s no real happy ending here, but there’s hope—except knowing the century of history that followed, that hope feels bitter and misplaced. After the entire harrowing story, it was the very last paragraph that kind of broke me: the quote from an obituary for a fallen soldier, expressing a hope for a century of prosperity and peace as World War I comes to an end. We all know there was no such century. 

All in all, this was a beautiful, painful, very well-crafted book that left me profoundly angry at the entire world that stubbornly refuses to learn.

Stories about characters going back to the hometowns they’ve left behind under suitably dramatic circumstances are my jam. It’s one of those tropes that immediately spikes my interest. And when it’s also enmeshed with witchiness and a big magical competition? Plus women bonding over a revenge against a shitty shared ex? Can’t pass that by.

Funnily enough, the magical competition turned out to be the part of the story that I most wanted to skim. It wasn’t bad exactly, there were some fun moments, but the magic often felt over-the-top and kind of cartoonish (while outside of the competition scenes there was a really cool witchy vibe). Ultimately, it felt like a plot device to lure Emmy back to Thistle Grove and not a central plotline. The revenge subplot also fell flat to me: the horrible ex just seemed so insignificant and uninteresting as a person. I could barely figure out how he managed to charm those three awesome female characters in the first place. I guess with Emmy it made sense because she was a teen back then, but with Linden and Talia? Come on, they should have known they deserved better.

Everything else about the book, though, I absolutely dig. The homecoming trope was done so right. I adored Emmy and Talia’s romance, how they sort of circled each other in smaller and smaller circles, the kiss in the haunted woods, the sushi date, the tattoo talk—everything. These two had such awesome chemistry! And then there were all the other relationships, like Emmy and Linden’s friendship, and how they addressed the issues between them and reaffirmed their bond throughout the book. And also Emmy’s reconnection with her family, especially her Mom—there was a scene in the latter half of the novel that made me tear up a little because of all the love and acceptance.

I also really enjoyed that while Emmy did miss a lot of things about her hometown and the magic permeating it, she was also quite happy with the life she’d built for herself in Chicago and her job there. It made the choice she had to make so much more meaningful. And while I’m listing off all the positives, I may as well mention all the awesome descriptions: a masterclass in engaging all the senses, truly, and such a great, grounding sense of place throughout.

I don’t re-read books often (there are just so many of them! And only 24 hours in every day, how is that fair???), but I might make an exception and pick this one again around Halloween sometime. It’s made for that spooky season.