Tales from the Loathly Lady

I did some traveling and had a couple work days with a lot of presence but not a lot of activity, so this one went very fast!

To Cage a Wild Bird by Brooke Fast

Gift from a friend, who I think has a friend of a friend of a friend kind of relationship to the author. It was ... fine? Dystopian new adult book about a world where prisoners are hunted for sport. There's a mysterious guard who keeps helping our heroine out, our heroine got herself thrown into prison because her brother was put there unfairly and she wanted to protect him, it pretty much hits all the expected beats. Likely would not have finished if it were not a travel book, to be honest. It's somebody's book but it's not really mine.

The Gentleman and the Vowsmith by Rebecca Ide

I did like this, but based on the cover copy it did bring up the question "is this actually a gothic, or is it set in a house?" I think by the end there were enough gothic elements to justify the mention on the cover copy, but I'd call it more of a country house murder mystery (was just discussing with friends the other day that those genres tend to involve similar tropes and set-ups but have different protagonists). It also is set in a magical version of England, and that's fine, I respect it, but society and history were just different enough that I started feeling annoyed Ide hadn't just built a new world, but just the same enough that I think I would have felt annoyed if Ide HAD built a new world. I think, all being as it was, given the point of doing magical historical England is the buttoned-up and confining social structures, I'd rather have had a whole new world so I didn't have to figure out how and why everything got so queer-normative. (Also an artifact of this: this book starts out being about marriage settlements between two parties, where because the gentleman is queer with no interest in women it becomes a matter of discussion how to provide stud services, but ALSO he's an attractive matrimonial prospect because he's quite magical and the upper classes rather breed for that? Which there's a brief mention of, but it should be a huge deal! Why isn't it a huge deal!!) There was a lot of good in this, and I think I'd try more Ide, I'd just love to see her stop straddling lines (gothic/not, our world/other world) and really dig into something.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman trans. Ros Schwartz

A weird book that I enjoyed a whole lot, actually. Surreal and sad and quiet, not interested in giving answers to people who want them. I don't have much of anything to say about it, but I like reading earlier specfic by women writers, especially who might not have conceptualized it as specfic. It's not like LeGuin, but I think if you like LeGuin you might like this.

The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer

It seems to me like I really like Shaffer's ideas, but I don't really like her executions. There were a lot of good things about this, characters I liked, an interesting concept for a story, but it could never quite get its tone right. It's a portal fantasy, but the setting and the setup don't quite match the fantasy world, which is slightly justified by the text but I'm not sure is justified enough by the text, if that makes sense? And there's a narrative intrusion throughout from a storyteller, but it was clumsily done and by far the worst offender on the tone thing. One of those books that made me just itch to rewrite it. As with the Fast above, this must be someone's book, but as it's written, not quite mine. I liked The Wishing Game much better, it still had the concept-execution gap for me, but the gap was at least smaller.

All Hail Chaos by Sarah Rees Brennan

By all rights, I should not enjoy these books as much as I do. I don't really like most of the subgenres this series pays homage to, nor do I like tongue-in-cheek takes on subgenre homage in general. However, Brennan is very good at what she does, and there's enough of an intense and blistering emotional core here to fight through things that a lesser author wouldn't be balancing well enough to keep me involved. This series has, for me, the Pratchett ability to deeply love something and also want to very much make fun of it: Evil Book Boyfriends, dark fantasy, fandom and self-insertion into fiction. However, it leans more towards homage than parody, even while it manages to be funny. Hm, reading this review, I feel like it pairs well with The Locked Tomb? They're very different writers, but there's something about that balancing on the knife's edge of funny and gutting. I'm nervous about how Brennan will bring this home, but I trust her, so I'm willing to give it a go despite the ominous title announcement that the trilogy will conclude with Kill Your Darlings.

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

Found it on an epistolary rec list! This one was a joy, funny and clever and just poignant enough to make up for the fact that it's extremely aware of its own cleverness. Also a bit of a parable on living under an authoritarian state that didn't feel too real in the LEAST, why would you ask. Apparently somebody made a musical out of this and I desperately need to know more.

A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna

The second Mandanna I've read, and I officially enjoy her! A cut above many of the current trend for witchy romcoms, especially this one, which I found better than the debut, I liked the romance better and the stakes felt high and the worldbuilding interesting. The background zany characters who get themselves involved in everything are much like Crusie at her height, though with significantly less of Crusie's humor. I look forward to more from Mandanna!

The Fall That Saved Us by Tamara Jerée

I saw this cover copy and I went "hmm, this is someone who cares deeply about Good Omens" and then I read a chapter and I went "Ah! I was mistaken! They care deeply about Good Omens and ALSO Supernatural." And then, to Jerée's credit, after a few chapters I went "Ah, someone who cares deeply about both of those canons and also has some Problems with them." Angels-and-demons fantasy is never my favorite kind, but as it goes, I did end up liking this one a lot, especially when it was about breaking free of your abusive family even if they're on the Side Of The Light. Not sure I'll read the sequel if and when that comes, though, so let that temper the review!

The Name Game by Beth O'Leary

Spoilers within for this one in particular!

O'Leary's one of the more interesting writers in the contemporary romance/romcom space right now, but hers are sometimes hit or miss for me. This one, unfortunately, was a miss, and it was because she sort of hoist herself by her own petard! See, O'Leary likes playing around with expectations by doing things with timelines and POV and any number of other things, so when we had two Charlie Joneses writing in their respective journals and then also 3rd-person POVs from a Charlie and a Jones as they respectively go by, each of those sections narrating a failed or failing relationship with an Aspen and an Oliver, I went "ah, I know what's going on here. Even in 3rd-person POV, we have unreliable narrators, and what's happening here is that they are exes who are pretending and staying VERY much in character pretending that they don't know each other, neither of them is named Charlie Jones." And I was half right, neither of them was named Charlie Jones! It's just that the 3rd-person POVs WERE a Charlie and a Jones. And while it did make more sense in retrospect, I was so charmed by the PG kink of "pretending I don't know my ex because we're both lying about our identities even to the point of pretending in my diary" that I was disappointed when it didn't turn out to be that. It would have been very, as the kids on tumblr and sometimes the AO3 would say, freak4freak. Anyway, if I hadn't been looking for The O'Leary Twist I might have liked it better, but I was so I didn't.

Island Summer by Hazel Wilson

A little children's book from 1949 to fulfill a bingo category for my town's bingo, about a family from Colorado spending a summer on a Maine island. I spent a lot of this book thinking about how I miss episodic fiction! There were some little threads that added up to an exciting episode, and the main character grew up a bit, and that's really all the book needed, mostly it was just snapshots of a summer. Also can tell Wilson has spent some time in Maine because there were times with the Local Characters I could hear my grandparents talking in the way Wilson wrote dialect, which was lovely and nostalgic for me. Not a great book, perhaps, but it will absolutely do for "20th century Maine fiction."

And that's all for this time! Right now I'm struggling through an ebook that's just good enough that I'd feel guilty abandoning it, but maybe I should take the fact that I'm even having that debate at all as a sign and read something more compelling instead.

I think six of these books have been read in the past week and a half? I went through something of a stuck spot for a while there, but I'm back in the habit again, at least somewhat! Having an easier time with ebooks than paper ones at present, maybe because I keep having reading time when I'm away from my bookshelves and haven't been reading paper books that fit in my purse.

The Husband Gambit by L.A. Witt

This one was a contemporary queer marriage of convenience story that was pretty good! A bit of a Cinderella story, to some extent, dealing with the "prince" in the situation's shitty family (including his horrible homophobic father who is trying to move from a Hollywood producing career into politics, and that didn't hit home at all!). It had enough going on that it didn't quite use all of it to the extent I could have wished, but I did enjoy the ensemble even if they weren't used super effectively at times. Not one I'll remember long, but not one I regret reading either.

Earth Earls Are Easy by Catherine Stein

One suspects Stein may have thought of the title first and based not just this book but what seems to be the setup for a series on it. But for all that, I had a good deal of fun with this one! I have run across, now, a few books in this wildly specific genre of "societal structures etc. are old-fashioned but it's set on Mars" (a book that was basically Chalet School only on Mars, this one, and one I haven't yet read that seems to be like WWII evacuees in Britain on Mars), and frankly I love it? More of this? This was basically a Victorian (I wouldn't say Regency, I'd say pretty solidly mid-to-late Victorian) romance novel, just set on Mars, and without the pretty historical costumes. A bit of an action romance, think more the type where there are spies and shit than just social dramas. Not always as graceful or deft as perhaps it could have been, but frankly I had a great time with this one so I don't really care.

A Legionnaire's Guide to Love and Peace by Emily Skrutskie

I really enjoyed this one! This was a fantasy romance that did a lot of things I really enjoyed with worldbuilding (cool magic system that had some implications and myth stuff I'd have loved to see more of), shockingly well-researched battle tactics (using the Roman century model), had a whole plot point about building a road, and above all else for me, is about the aftermath of defeating the Great Evil and mopping up the smaller evils in its wake and seeing what will get built in its place. The romance was sweet, but really not the part of things that I enjoyed most--not that it was in the least bad! I was just too busy enjoying the other aspects to really get swept in by it too much. (Which can also sometimes be a danger of a friends to lovers situation for me where all of the moments of building trust and affection happened off-screen before the story began.)

The Connection by Kate Simpson-Shaw

A little bit of sapphic contemporary fluff that I picked up when it was either quite on sale or free recently. It was sweet, not much to say about it! There was a minute there when I thought we were going to go WAY more gothic than the bright pink cover implied and do some sapphic incest business involving one of the love interest's sisters romantically pining for her, but that didn't end up happening (even if it would have made more sense, weirdly, than where Simpson-Shaw tried to take things). Not that I mind it being exactly what it said on the tin, but that was my thought process while I was reading!

The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer

I really liked this! Books about books, you know? Eccentric author of a children's book series who hasn't published one in a while has written a draft and has summoned four people to take part in a contest for ownership of the draft, all four being adults who while children ran away to his private island that's a mirror of the one from his book series. Our heroine desperately needs the money to adopt a small boy she's bonded with, and our hero is the illustrator of the author's books. It's maybe not the deepest or most gorgeously written version of this story, but I just really liked it! A sweet thing to read right before a really stressful week!

The Great Balance Series (A Lady of Vision, A Scholar of Beauty, A Thief of Treason) by Jen Lynning

Reviewing these all together, because I've read them all in the past week, though with a book in between books two and three! Read an introductory novella to this world a year or two ago, and saw this was either on sale or free at some point so I picked it up! I keep wanting to be more excited about indie fantasy romance the way I was a few years back before it got Super Trendy and thus picked up a lot of Tropes That Have To Be There, and I liked this a lot more than I've liked a lot of what I've run across recently--I mean, obviously, to the extent that I finished the series! Mostly I like the worldbuilding mechanics in this, that there are prayer-magics that can be invoked to create certain effects but that have to be balanced by equal and opposite effects (for instance, a minor character in the second book traded the beauty of her lovely singing voice to become physically beautiful, but there are also technological uses, the second book is the most fun for those). I liked the middle best, though the romance was a slightly hard sell for me, but overall, if not exactly groundbreaking, I was just glad to have some fantasy romance that's its own thing without doing the trends too hard. Also, the novella in this series is pretty much required reading, FYI, it's not in this bundle but I think it's free on the author's website?

Not Another Family Wedding by Jackie Lau

Contemporary romance I don't have a ton to say about! I always appreciate a romance where the couple explicitly does not want to have children, plus there's an abortion in the heroine's past, which is VANISHINGLY rare. However, I was a little irked by both the hero and heroine clearly not wanting to have kids and having been friends for a long time but them not telling each other that being pretty much the main thing keeping them from committing for 2/3-3/4 of the book. People don't always communicate perfectly, obviously, and if they did it would make for boring books, but that miscommunication didn't work so much for me. Mostly I was really invested in the heroine and her family as she and her sister struggle through something and as she assimilates the failure of her parents' marriage and the ways they failed her when her sister was born.

The Painted Crown by Megan Derr

I'm going to say: I think I discovered Derr's earlier work first, maybe, and was charmed by the inexpert indulgence in it, and keep reading her newer work when I want the sheer indulgence and not quite finding it as much as I wish I could. Is this objectively better than some of the earlier works by her that I read? It very much is! There's fun politics going on, some sharpshooter rescue mission stuff happening, this and The Engineered Throne are both actually really solid fantasy romances. It's just that I picked it up hoping for Absolute Fluff and I shouldn't have, Derr's recent work has too much range for that! I should keep her in mind for fantasy romance cravings that don't succumb to the Trends I mentioned above instead of Absolute Indulgent Fluff now. (Though I do need to find a new supplier of Absolute Indulgent Fluff, apparently.)

That's all for this time! With a work break coming up week after next, I'm hoping I'll be back with another one of these sooner rather than later.

Here we are again! Slowed down a bit this time, for a variety of reasons, and man, my pattern for the year of short books being what I'm in the mood for and enjoying the most certainly seems to be holding true. My poor attention span!

Miss Percy's Pocket Guide (to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons) by Quenby Olson

This one was plenty charming but for some unaccountable reason I struggled to get through it! I love a story about a trod-upon spinster gathering herself and figuring out how to make her life a better one, and this fit the bill, plus there was a dragon! Maybe I was just in the wrong mood for it? I really don't think it's anything Olson did wrong. I'm not sure I'll read the rest of the series, but if you're a fan of Marie Brennan's dragon books these might scratch the same itch.

Radio Romance by Ariella Monti

A very slight novella, lots of time skips, but I really liked it for a. having good lead chemistry, a thing that's bafflingly rare these days and b. showing that the leads were the write people who couldn't ever quite find the right time until the end. There wasn't much to it, but I did like it!

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

I feel like in the hurry-rush of publishing these days, where everyone both self-pub and trad-pub needs to make money so much and stay relevant and in the public eye that they're churning their books out at unsustainable speeds that impact quality, Harrow is that rare writer who gets objectively better with every book. It's not that every book is relevant to my interests (I enjoyed her last one, the Gothic, but I can't say that's really my genre), just that she really seems dedicated to honing her craft. And in this one her craft has been honed AND it's relevant to my interests in that there's a sad bisexual lady knight, a sad storyteller/academic, and time loop/travel fuckery, so I LOVED it. It's not an easy read, but it said a lot of things about the stories people tell and the stories governments tell and also about trauma. Good read for Arthuriana fans who don't want to read another Arthuriana retelling.

A Drowned Maiden's Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz

A middle grade about an orphan who gets adopted by a trio of sisters who are fake mediums at the height of spiritualism and who grapples with wanting a family, with figuring out what ethics are and how to have them, and with a bunch of other things too. This was really lovely! I've read a bit of Schlitz before and enjoyed it but this felt like a cut above. Good read for your preteen relative who liked Anne of Green Gables but wanted something a little darker and less episodic.

The Changeling by Juniper Butterworth

Chose to style this as it was on the cover but Butterworth seems to be a barely-veiled pseudonym, so it's hard to tell if that's the right call sometimes. But anyway! A small weird interesting poly romance. I like when I find a fantasy romance that's a fantasy romance and not a Romantasy, both the dark and cozy sides of the current trends annoy me but sometimes you run across something that is just being itself! I can't say it was super central to my usual vibe, but again, it was itself, I'm not going to turn my nose up at it at ALL. Could have used a bit more meat on it, though. I feel like there's a readalike for the vibe of the fey here but it's not coming to my brain, but it isn't Sarah J. Maas or even Holly Black, if that is important to you in either direction.

The Heart Is a Universe by Sherry Thomas

When I saw that the author of one of my favorite historicals that I've read in the last five years (Ravishing the Heiress) wrote a sci fi romance novella I had to read it, and I've been saving it for ages and decided the time was right. And man, this was a mixed bag? (Which I've discovered is largely true of Thomas for me in general, actually, despite my glowing love of RtH--except for its B-plot about the hero's sister, so even that's a mixed bag I suppose.) On one hand, there was fun worldbuilding, the relationship was developed in interesting ways, and there was ... more of an attempt at dealing in an interesting and kind way with disability than either romance or sci fi is often willing to do, there was some Miraculous Cure shit going on at the end that I didn't love, but like. Romance. The disability was killing the hero. So. Anyway, the disappointment here is that the ending was abrupt, completely changed the scope of the story and then abandoned it largely unresolved, and made it more into a fantasy vibe than a sci fi one--like, sci fi is fantasy, right, just with different trappings? But the trappings got a bit too fantasy for me there. So this was frustrating in that it was nearly exactly what I wanted, but couldn't quite get there.

Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo

Got behind on these, hoping to do the next one in the series soon, but man, Vo could write one of these yearly for the foreseeable future and I would eat them up with a spoon. This one wasn't even one of my favorites in the series, it's just that the scale for this series is so good that "less favorite" still means "a gorgeous jewel of a novella, with MAMMOTHS." I think the less favorite was just because until pretty close to the end the storytelling wasn't as much a part of things, at least overtly, as it is in some other books. I loved getting some depth on the neixin, though, that was really cool (and wrenching, in places).

If Not, Winter by Sappho trans. Anne Carson

I read this in college as part of a sequence of courses that surveyed influential Western literature, and this was one of the earliest ones in the sequence and, I think, the one I loved most. I for some reason got rid of my copy at some point, but I stumbled into it at Goodwill and it felt like fate, so I settled in for a reread! Even if Carson takes some liberties, it's just such a beautiful translation (there was one about apples that caught my attention this time that I didn't remember from the college read), and absolutely worth enjoying. I read Carson's Oresteia a few years back, I should read more of her work. There's a real clarity in her prose.

Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory

I'd been saving this one for a while. A sapphic from Guillory? Be still my heart! Anyway, it really was a joy, full of queer events, growing pains in friendships, indulgent outfit descriptions, and, as of course the title implies, flirtation. One character, Avery, is fresh off a breakup with a man and exploring her queerness (bisexual characters!!!) and her need for control, and the other, Taylor, has dated pretty much every queer woman in the region and is discovering that it kind of hurts that some of her friends don't think she's capable of anything deep, and they both go on lovely satisfying journeys, especially Taylor.

Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith

To start, it feels deeply weird referring to this as one book. It's Smith's preferred way these days, so I bow to that, but I was introduced to it as a duology, my copies are a duology, and they really do feel like separate books to me, with separate arcs and stakes and all that. But I shan't gainsay the author! Anyway, I was thinking about that a lot because I think I read the first book/half of the book twice as a teenager, but I read the second ... conservatively twenty? I haven't read either in several years, definitely longer than I've been making these posts and probably longer than that, but there are still large swathes of Court Duel, the second half, that I have memorized, and it's been formative of both my reading and my writing to an extent that I think you can only understand if you read the book and then a bunch of my original fiction, especially my older work. The epistolary romance! The indulgent outfit descriptions (two books in a row apparently)! FAN LANGUAGE. Anyway, this actually does stand the test of time quite well, I think! Lots of fun politics, some world-stage politics happening in ways I didn't pay attention to before (but which makes sense because Smith spends a lot of time on the epic history and politics of her Sartorias-deles world), some interesting bits of worldbuilding, overall a delightful romp and an excellent way to spend the last couple of days.

Okay, I was feeling wordy this time! Anyway, a few standouts here (three from this list made my top ten for the year so far, the Harrow at the very top), and a few more meh ones. We'll hope for my continued decent reading luck to continue! 2026 hasn't been stellar, but it's still been a breath of fresh air after a few rough reading years so far.

First post of the year! It's a better start than some I've had lately, so I will take it.

( Four werewolf mysteries, two sci fi novellas, and a partridge in a pear tree. )

That's all for this time! Hopefully the next batch will be similarly fast.

I've read five books since my last post, not quite as many as I wanted but more than I expected given how socially busy the end of the year has been (and given I reread two of my own books prepping for an edit I started at midnight last night and I don't count my own books to my total). I'll do quick reviews of those, and then I'll do my top ten and reading statistics for the year!

( Last five books of the year! )


And now the top ten! I feel like I said much the same last year (I did, I just checked), but while there were a good amount of books I liked this year, there were not a ton that I loved. I'd say the first six on this list were solid, would have made the top ten in most reading years that weren't exceptional, and the last four were ones I liked plenty but were kind of "the best of the rest."

• Cinder House by Freya Marske
• The West Passage by Jared Pechacek
• The Touchstone Series by Andrea K. Höst
• Murder By Memory by Olivia Waite
• Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
• Half-Witch by John Schoffstall
• The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
• The Orb of Cairado by Katherine Addison
• Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
• The Marquis Who Mustn't by Courtney Milan

Interesting to me how many of those were novellas! Plus the one play, which is rather like a novella, I think, the point is "lots of short things in my top ten."

Statistics! I read 135 books this year, 13 more than last year, which isn't bad given I have still been reading rather ridiculous amounts of firefighters fic on the AO3. Of those books:

• 22 were rereads (more on that in a moment)
• 9 were nonfiction
• 1 was a graphic novel
• 85 were SFF (though 3 are better termed horror)
• 56 were romances or romance-focused
• Either 2 or 5 were mysteries depending on whether you count Addison's Thara Celehar books as mysteries or not
• 32 were for younger readers

I met a few reading goals this year! I read all of L. Frank Baum's Oz books, which was one of my major goals, and I got a blackout on my town library's book bingo card (only one bingo on another library's harder book bingo, though I didn't focus much on that one since I'm not eligible for the prizes). I also wanted this to be a year of reading epistolary fiction, and, well ... I had 22 rereads, and a lot of that was epistolary fiction. Overall, I just did a quick count, and I read 11 books I would term epistolary (one more featured some letters but was primarily narrative, and another contained lots of non-fictional letters but didn't get the correspondence vibe right), and I think four of them were new? I keep looking for lists of proper epistolary books and not finding what I want, and I'm not sure if that's because people are bad at writing lists or because there aren't as many epitolary books as I want there to be.

I'm not sure of my reading goals for this year! I think I only have two preorders on my list, which is pretty dire, and I do have a bunch of books on my shelves right now that I'm excited about, but I keep getting my hopes up and having them dashed, so I am really just going to hope that this year has some books that really sweep me away.

Saw the end of the year staring me down and got motivated to clear my shelves a little! And also I'm no longer in the busiest period of my year so I have a little more free brain space to read. I doubt I'll make it another full post before year's end, but we'll see, I still have one book bingo square to go ("sports or leisure activity" my beloathed, I may simply read a hockey romance novel since there are a bunch of them featured on the library ebook service right now thanks to the one show) and there are lots of options for me to enjoy!

( Some very solid reads, and I finally read Tom Stoppard's Arcadia! )

And that's all for this time! Now it's a race to the end of the year!

Took another trip, which meant airport books, and then a few fast reads, so a nice fast post this time, thank goodness! And I even managed to get one into my top ten for the year, which feels pretty miraculous.

( Two Baums, two Marskes, and some scattershot! )

No clue when the next one's coming, but hopefully I'll get another seasonal romance or two in among finishing the Oz series and maybe returning to some epistolary!

Tomorrow's a busy work day, so it's time for one of these again!

( My murder mystery era continues, and also my D&D table is writing so much fic and it's great. )

Okay, that's all! See you again for one of these at the end of the year and hopefully within the next week for a book post!

Slowed down again! Busy part of summer and when I haven't been busy my brain has simply been either Gone or focused on my D&D game, since my whole table is writing D&D porn right now. But I'm through a batch now, anyway!

( A mixed bag this time! )

And that's all for this time! There were some good ones in this batch, but man, so few books are completely whisking me away this year, the two rereads on this list are for sure the best, and it's not even close!

Normally I don't like to do these until the last day of the month they get posted in, but I'm about to go out of town and liable to forget, so I'll post a few days early instead!

( DMing is a Wild Time )