booksthatburn's reviews
1463 reviews

THE SORCERER OF THE WILDEEPS is lyrical and fantastic, with excellent prose made somehow even better by the audiobook narrator's performance. This falls into a particular category of story for me, one where it feels so good to read on a sentence-by-sentence level that I'm fine being confused by the overall story. The focus jumps around suddenly and unpredictably, with the narrative shifting more often as the ending nears. 

The worldbuilding is immersive, conveying the language barrier in the gap between what Demane thinks and how stilted his speech is with the rest of the caravan. I love the way AAVE is used by the caravan brothers, forming a blend between casual speech and Demane's smatterings of technical knowledge that he keeps trying to apply to what's happening. It creates a visceral sense of the language barrier he experiences, wanting to say so much more but not having the words, or frustrated that the closest words don't carry the meanings he intends. 

The ending is ambiguous, but it's clearly meant to be unresolved rather than a teaser or cliffhanger. There is a sequel, but it seems to be an indirect follow-up. 

Clementine was turned into a vampire several months ago, but doesn't know how it happened. When he finally gets desperate enough to try biting a random stranger, that stranger turns out to be Justin. Justin grew up with vampires as his friends, neighbors, and almost-family, and has been protecting the vampires in his neighborhood ever since a terrible mistake he made a decade ago. He offers to let Clementine pay him for his blood, and what begins as a business transaction gradually turns into something much more vital and intimate. 

Clementine has spent his life feeling like his needs are too strange and specific to be accommodated. His siblings care about him, but they keep waiting for him to find a romantic partner and he's never felt the stuff that everyone talks about being so wonderful. Becoming a vampire just made things even worse. Now he can't go to his sister's evening functions because they'll be too loud, and he can't attend the daytime ones because he'd get sun poisoning and might actually die (instead of just feeling like the noise will kill him). When he first bites Justin, his blood is just okay. Nothing special, nothing like how amazing blood directly from a human is supposed to taste for a vampire. But then, gradually, the more Clementine gets to know Justin, to care about him as a person and not just a willing meal, the better his blood tastes. It's unexpected and wonderful, as welcome as it is precarious. Because now he knows how good it can be, which means he doesn't want it to end.

HOW TO SELL YOUR BLOOD & FALL IN LOVE is set up as a stand-alone story. It features extremely brief interactions with the main characters from the first book, but should make sense even to someone who treats this as an entry point for the series, or who just reads this and no connected stories. The two books share a villain, kind of, as the antagonists of both stories are working with/for a pharmaceutical company which experiments on vampires, routinely torturing and killing them in the name of science. Clementine actually appeared briefly in HOW TO BITE YOUR NEIGHBOR & WIN A WAGER, as one of the scientists at the lab. 

The main storyline is so self-contained that someone could enjoy this human/vampire romance without having read the first book. However, it’s pretty clear from a few mid-story moments and the cliffhanger ending that this is meant to be part of an ongoing saga, not just the travails of vampires plagued by an evil company on an individual basis. 

The worldbuilding is very cohesive, set in a world just like our own except that vampires, werewolves, and some other kinds of not-fully-human people exist. Things I love about this story, in no particular order: Clementine writing fanfic, Justin's salt and pepper shaker collection, the audiobook narrator's excellent performance, Clementine and Justin when the tour group came by, the store's transformation.

The ending emotionally wrapped up in a very satisfying manner, then established a logistical cliffhanger in the final moments to tease the next book. It’s done well and is more in the vein of making the next problem clear than anything else. Before that cliffhanger, however, the final few chapters were deeply moving for me as a queer person. There’s a moment where I instantly knew the thing that connected all the people waiting in line, before it’s explained in the text. It’s just one of many ways that the story is made better by dealing with anti-vampire sentiment as one of many prejudices, putting it in a context with homophobia, transphobia, classism, and ableism. One more way people are shitty to those they view as non-persons. It’s frustratingly believable that the villain would be a pharmaceutical company. This is absolutely not the final book, though I’m not sure if it’s meant to just be a trilogy or a longer series. 

Vincent has been sneaking into Wesley's house to bite him at night because his blood tastes so good he can't stay away. Wesley needs a vampire to hand in to a shady pharmaceutical company which experiments on vampires. Wesley wants the access to get information about his mother's disappearance after she signed up for one of the drug trials, but as he gets to know Vincent he starts seeing him as a person rather than just a means to an end. Vincent doesn't trust Wesley enough to confide that he's sleeping rough, hounded by someone who hates him for being a vampire and starts spreading that information to make his life impossible. The vampire hunters who work for the pharmaceutical company use classist tactics to make it impossible for vampires to live stable lives, then further take advantage of the precarity caused by being unhoused and unemployed to further the fear of vampires due to their diet. 

HOW TO BITE YOUR NEIGHBOR AND WIN A WAGER has a self-contained and very satisfying story, featuring a slow exploration of the boundaries between "liking someone who is a vampire" and having a vampire fetish. The romance builds slowly, held back for a while by mutual distrust and fascination which eventually turns into passion. I get very stressed out by stories where at least one of the characters in a relationship is lying, but this was handled in a way that meant I was able to finish the story without being too stressed to keep reading. I like a lot of things about how this was handled, from the worldbuilding sneaking in info about how vampires have existed for hundreds of years (or longer), to Wesley's long-distance best friend who can provide emotional support but can't solve the logistical problems. A lot of excellent storytelling decisions were involved, and I had a great time reading this.

I'm pretty sure one of the minor characters is the protagonist of the next book, but even if I'm wrong, there are some pretty big things that Vincent and Wesley weren't able to handle which could be addressed in future books. I'm looking forward to the next one!

THE THIRTEENTH HOUR is an intricate and emotional gaslamp fantasy of apostasy in a world where every mortal was created by a specific god in their own image, and everything is a sin to someone. 

The worldbuilding is complex and detailed, with twelve domains plus a hub world (Chime), special characteristics and abilities for the various kinds of mortals, and gods with their own agendas, mores, and conflicting definitions of sin. In less skilled hands, this could be a disorienting mess of an infodump with no hope of salvaging an understandable story. Instead, almost all of the story takes place in Chime (with a few brief visits to one other domain), there's a tight focus on two specific characters and a relatively small assortment of enemies, allies, and political machinations. The types of mortals are described consistently, and more details are added gradually enough that I could get a strong sense of a few types before learning about a few more as they became more relevant. The Godless are a large enough group to have around half of the kinds of mortals, but they aren't some coincidentally complete assortment of all the types. Not every group is represented, which is consistent with how they have different experiences of their respective gods. The crueler the god is to their followers, the more likely it is that they wound up among the Godless, but it's not a strict correlation.

The Godless have rejected their deities, some of them due to a particular incident several years ago, but others with their own specific traumas, moments of disillusionment, and reasons to keep themselves apart from the divinities who shape their existences and treat them as playthings. One of my favorite parts of the setting is that within this focus on sin, redemption, and the divine, each of the gods has their own definition of what "sin" is. This emphasizes how unhelpful it is as a concept for those who spend their lives worried about sinning, and how useful it is as a tool for the gods to use the threat of damnation and divine displeasure to keep their mortals in line. 

As the first book in a series, THE THIRTEENTH HOUR has its own story and a satisfying conclusion. It resolves several major plot points (both logistically and relationally) and ends with a paradigm shift which will have to be addressed in the following book. It's great as its own narrative, and as the beginning of the trilogy, and I'm very interested in what happens next.

The dynamic between Kayl, Quen, and Malk is not really a love triangle, and much more a story of Kayl and Quen figuring out their current relationships are abusive (to varying degrees) and going through the slow process of exiting them and trying for something better. Quen is nearly as emotionally entangled with Elijah as Kayl is with Malk. However, the fact that he has visions of each person's death when he touches them means he's not as physically intimate in that relationship, even as his internal life is frequently shaped by fears of Elijah's reaction to what he's doing. He's been removing his own memories in an attempt to keep control of his own mind, even if that control is at the cost of slowly losing himself. If you read THE THIRTEENTH HOUR hoping for a "girl picks between two guys" story, that's only technically part of what's happening and it might feel unsatisfying. It's a "two people pick between two other people" story, which is much clunkier to say and definitely not the point. Kayl's love for Malk is a constant motivation for her decisions with regards to Malk himself, but Quen's promise that they are partners in the investigation gradually becomes a stronger part of Kayl's choices and motivations. I did not read it as a love triangle, and so wasn't disappointed in any way by the narrative focus and how things develop between Kayl and Quen. 

I love the characters and I'm deeply interested in the series as a whole. The world is changing and I want to know how they handle it.

I wish it didn’t keep some of the ableist language from the original, but this is an excellent graphic novel adaptation.

*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book. 

**My recommendation has been pulled based on issues with the author. The original text of the review remains below.

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HEART, HAUNT, HAVOC is a captivating story of horror and connection, beginning when a trans exorcist starts falling for his nonbinary client. Things escalate as the only way to remove the spirits plaguing them is to dig into the client's painful past. 

I like the relationship between Colin and Bishop. I rarely get to read romances where both characters in a relationship are trans and/or nonbinary, so I was excited to read this and very pleased with how it's handled. 

As the first book in a series, HEART, HAUNT, HAVOC resolves the major issue of the haunting Colin arrived to handle. It also sets up the possibility of later appearances, though a quick glance at the descriptions of the next two books indicates that the main character won't be the same as the series moves forward. I like the story, I like the setting, and I'm interested in the idea of an exorcist who understands himself as abandoned by his god, but is still some relevant level of devout. Though the way the worldbuilding clearly establishes the presence of at least three spiritual/magical traditions in play, it implies the possibility of many more.