booksthatburn's reviews
1463 reviews

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

A DARK AND DROWNING TIDE is a rivals-to-lovers queer romance and murder mystery, which spends a lot of time on "rivals" a satisfying amount on "lovers", and just enough on the murder mystery to hold the whole thing together.  

Lorelei is Yevani, (i.e. Jewish), having grown up in a ghetto and only been admitted to the university by dint of mentorship by an influential folklorist and academic. As a Yeva, Lorelei is in a precarious position within the expedition. She's "smart enough" to get in, but not trusted once she's there. Her competence is at once needed and suspect, especially once the expedition's leader (and her mentor) is murdered in the night when their journey is barely underway. The small group proceeds, though no one person trusts everyone else now that a murderer is in their midst. Lorelei is trying to lead the investigation and figure out the identity of the killer, but she keeps getting distracted by how exasperatingly lovely Sylvia is.  

The expedition is to find a magical spring (the Urspring) at the behest of Wilhelm,  wants to form a united kingdom of what are currently several different provinces with their own rulers. It seems analogous to the transformation of the various Germanies into a united Germany. Much of the worldbuilding is conveyed through interactions between the members of the expedition, as they all have very different perspectives on the idea of uniting the provinces into a single kingdom. Even those who agree it would be good do so for very different reasons.  The members of the group are apparently united by their loyalty to William. Furthermore, they're all from different kingdoms, and everyone except Loreli knew each other as children. This means that she's an outsider both for being Yeva and for not sharing a specific past with the rest of them. 

The mystery elements are the scaffold upon which the romance rests, part of what pulls to Lorelei to Sylvia is that she's circumstantially unlikely (or even impossible) to have been the killer, leaving Lorelei to feel as if she's the only reasonable ally in dangerous circumstances. Lorelei can't trust her absolutely, at least not at first, but she can trust Sylvia to be herself, and that's good enough. I like their dynamic, it fits them and the narrative very well. Things unfold slowly between because they continue to be rivals well into the story. Lorelei also keeps thinking of folktales she has collected. Their placement within the story does a good job of conveying her frame of mind as well as building out the world. 

I love the ending, the final few chapters are my favorite part. I like how the various story threads are wrapped up.

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

**This is the thirteenth book in an ongoing series, and by necessity commenting on this book spoils the events of some previous books. If you're interested in the idea of a family of cryptozoologists working to understand the cryptids around them and to defend them from a single-minded xenophobic organization (with more than a few ghosts and some dimension-hopping woven in for good measure), then stop here and go read DISCOUNT ARMAGEDDON, the first book in the series.

AFTERMARKET AFTERLIFE is the first Incryptid book narrated by Mary Dunlavy, the babysitting ghost who has been around longer than any one member of the Price-Healy family still living, surpassing even Thomas and Alice. Mary is a babysitting ghost, but she never really lets go of her charges (not even when they're grown and having kids of their own). What was supposed to be Alice and Thomas's long-awaited return to the family is disrupted by violence when the dragon Nest in New York is attacked and Mary is pulled to the scene by the call of Verity and Dominic's child's distress. As the war with the Covenant of Saint George turns violent in a burst of coordinated attacks, only a dimension-hopping ghost could keep up with all the action spread over North America between roughly a dozen family members and involving even more allies, cryptid and human alike. 

I like Mary as a narrator. She's a great choice for narrating Alice and Thomas's return since she was part of his disappearance. Also, she's ideal for allowing the story to play out with so many important characters and geographically dispersed events on a timescale which doesn't allow for mundane travel methods. The first few chapters focus on her version of the recap, but, for me, one of the joys of this series is reading how different characters recollect earlier events. 

I don't know yet if this is an okay place to start for someone who wanted to jump into the series midway. I won't have a good answer for that until I know where the next book picks things up. It's either an all-right entry point because of how well things are summarized by Mary's recounting of the events that got them here, or a terrible one because so many plot threads from the first twelve books converge very suddenly and much of the emotional impact would be missing for a reader who treated this as a starting point. Such a reader would be in a position much closer to Arthur than anyone else, but I'm too immersed in the series to be certain how that would pan out. As always, I recommend starting from the beginning. So many important things were introduced there, and if the blurb grabbed you, it'll be even better if you follow the whole journey. Failing that, either SPELUNKING THROUGH HELL (#11) for TRICKS FOR FREE (#7) would be good options for a midway start, given how important Alice and Annie are to AFTERMARKET AFTERLIFE. 

AFTERMARKET AFTERLIFE is an important step in putting an end to the war between the Covenant and the Prices, or at least stopping one particular Covenant member's obsession with Annie that fuels this sudden round of violence. The newest storyline focuses on the attacks which begin in New York but quickly spread elsewhere as it becomes clear that the Covenant won't stop so quickly in their goal of wiping out the Prices. It was supposed to be a chance for Thomas to get to know his family after so long kept away, and for Alice to get to know her kids now that she had a shot at sticking around. Unfortunately, any slice of time interesting enough to be an Incryptid book had no shot at remaining as dubiously idyllic as this reunion ought to be. Several plot threads were moved forward, mostly related to particular interpersonal conflicts and reunions between various family members and newly-family adoptees, but it remains to be seen how much was actually resolved amidst so much chaos. There is a distinct sense of finality in the ending. It has just enough emotional closure to avoid being a cliffhanger, but it leaves room for the next book to go in many directions (depending on how well the strike against the Covenant worked out). No matter what happens next, several things have changed for Mary and the Prices, and there's no going back. I'll follow wherever the next book takes me, this was great and I'm ready for more.

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

THE BEAST OF LOUGHBY ISLAND is a tightly-written horror story set on a small island. A werewolf-like creature has begun menacing and killing the island's inhabitants, starting with a xenophobic family who just finished dropping off their kidnap victim. The focus shifts between characters as they're stalked in turn and try to figure out what's going on as the bodies pile up. 

It's been a long time (if ever) since I read a straight-up monster story that isn't also a romance. There's a strong sense of place, and time to get a sense of most of the characters before their messy ends. This is a good read, and a quick one. 

SAVAGE LEGION deals with entangled systems of oppression and marginalization in a colonial empire which does its best to hide its wars from the citizens. It engages with classism, xenophobia, ableism, and transphobia in a complex way that understands these biases as tools of subjugation by empire, within and without their borders. Moreover, it does it in a setting where the connections between these bigotries make sense in how they would arise in this particular setting. The titular "Savages" are the epitome of the civilization’s hunger: people torn from their lives to die in service of perpetuating myths of rightness and hope. For all that, their underlying ordinariness is central to this churning machine of power and subjugation: those within the empire are tools to maintain its myths, those outside are irrelevant (except when they’re being attacked).

The core of the tangle of marginalization and bigotry is this: in the Empire, people should be useful and definable. Anyone who fails one of these criteria usually does so by being poor, disabled, refusing to declare a binary gender, or making too much noise to be worth leaving alone. The mix of protagonists means that there’s someone for all of these supposed failings, perhaps more than one. What they have in common is the way they impede the system or highlight its failures, neither of which is acceptable to those in power. I’ve become used to stories which pick one or two marginalizations and ignore the rest, or which treat them as individual problems which happen to coexist. Disability in particular tends to get ignored in fantasy unless it's the entire point of the book. That is not the case here. Not only is one of the main characters physically disabled, she's far from the only disabled character who is named and matters to the story. 

I’m intrigued by where this late-stage-empire story will head next, but no matter what it promises to be fascinating.

Lots of infodumping.

THE GENTLEMAN'S BOOK OF VICES has a good start, an enjoyable middle, and an ending that is in turns stressful and anticlimactic. While ultimately not one I care for, it might appeal to those who don't mind oddly convenient resolutions to problems the characters can't quite find their way out of.

The biggest tension is that Charlie is engaged to marry a woman he likes but does not love (or at least is not interested in, sexually), since's he's gay and would rather be a confirmed bachelor if the choice had been afforded to him. He's marrying as part of a scheme between their parents to get the two of them married and Charlie's debts settled. The problem is that, around a month before the wedding, Charlie meets and is infatuated with Miles, a pornographer who runs a bookshop. Miles won't sleep with a married man, so if Charlie wants to keep seeing Miles for longer than a fling, he'll have to call the wedding off. For a long while it seemed like everything revolved around whatever Charlie was going to decide, with Miles having made his position clear but not able to control whether or not Charlie got married. 

I think I like my books with a bit more stress but not this kind of stress. I dislike lying in relationships and am rarely able to handle them in fiction, and this manages to have a lot of that stress without most of the actual lies, which doesn't soothe things for me as much as it could have. I'd prefer a book where it feels like the characters worked for the ending, like something is different by the end because they have changed in a meaningful way. Miles may have, but so much of the narrative focus in terms of agency is on Charlie that I'm not even totally certain of that. The resolution seems to be just handed to them, and in a way that changes my thoughts about the beginning as well. It's likely too sexually explicit to work for those who prefer their romances closed-door or fade-to-black, while dodging explicit detail once things really get going. It's not for me, though I had a good time in parts.

THE POMEGRANATE GATE is a portal fantasy set in a mythical version of Spain during the Inquisition. It ask questions of personhood, interchangeability and sacrifice through a lens of found family and Jewish identity during hardship. 

As the first book in a series, it resolves several major plot points related to character identity and backstory, initially, but not only, the question of why Toba can neither shout nor run, as if something hobbles her the moment she exerts herself to be noticeable. Some even bigger events in play aren't get resolved by the end, as Toba and Naftaly are not yet able to solve such huge problems.

Toba is constrained by a mysterious set of rules that have no obvious origin but which mean she spends almost all her time at home. Naftaly, for his part, is muddling along as less than what his family wants but not knowing what to try instead. His father warned him never to speak of his dreams, but this need for secrecy has cut him off from connections that could help him flourish, despite the dangers. When their families are forced to flee or convert, they get lost in a strange wood and Toba disappears into another world, while Naftaly finds himself miles away from where he started.

The world building is intricate and cohesive, consistent in a way that means it makes sense without having to resort to infodumps. Because Toba is new to this other world, whenever she figures something out, or has something explained to her there’s some reason why the reader would want to know it at that time. The explanations feel very natural because they are literally explanations in the text to someone who does not already know the situation, as well as, her own investigations of what’s happening, especially since the Maziks are reluctant to give her any information at first. I’m very impressed with how well the balance is maintained between short-term goals, and long-term stakes. The romance between Naftaly and the mysterious Mazik is very cool, I like how it's handled and it's one of my favorite parts. I also love Toba's arc, especially the questions that are raised about identity and personhood, and how those are handled. It's a set of tropes I'm used to seeing in sci-fi but a are especially unusual in fantasy, let alone to be taken this seriously and handled this well.

I enjoyed this, and I’m looking forward to the sequel.