incipientdreamer's reviews
570 reviews

 Miss me with that teenage angst 

 wtf was this and where was the "garden"??? 

 Sapphic noir fantasy by C.L. Polk and with THAT cover?!

Move over Destiel because there's a new ship in town! This was such a great, short novella. Sapphic noir fantasy, think Supernatural but set in the 1930s. It's honestly everything I used to love about Supernatural, the writing is wonderful. I loved the references to queer nightclubs and the fashion from the 30s. The atmosphere was perfectly in line with the demon-hunting private investigators and Faustian bargains with demons. While the start was a bit shaky, C. L. Polk was quick to assert their storytelling skills by building up the most precious love story. The payoff was great, especially that moment when the title of the book is mentioned! 

 3.75 stars
Such a weird creepy little fucker this book was. It's the horror genre at its best. There aren't many books that fully deliver when it comes to delivering but I feel like this one and Alexis Henderson's The Year of the Witching really understood the assignment. What I absolutely loved about Leech was the atmosphere it built so beautifully. The cold cold weather, the creepy parasites, and twins, fanatic rich folks. Everything was perfect. The narration was haunting and a classic case of unreliable narrators. It was also first-person POV so that also lent a sense of unreliability and instability to the story.

The imagery and writing were beautiful and I was fully immersed in the story. It was able to scare me but also grab my attention like the tendrils of Pseudomycota. The plot was really good in the first two-thirds of the novel but the last third wasn't as tight. Maybe I was in a weird reading mood but I was unable to read it for very long despite how thrilling it was. A better editor might have been able to trim it down, but I guess the pacing was a bit sluggish in order to build up suspense.

I was a bit miffed about the ending because it wasn't as satisfying or complete as I would have liked from a book labeled as a stand-alone. I would be down to read sequels or further novels by this author but I do feel like it's unfair to mark a book as a standalone but not have a fixed ending.

Mindfuckery, parasites, ethical dilemmas, and unreliable narrators. Leech is a formidable debut and the horror genre at its finest(and weirdest)! 

 5 stars

Everything I love in a book condensed into one bite-sized story. Lady knights, oaths of fealty, timey wimey shit, and 2nd person POV payoff! Trust me, the blurb does not even scratch the surface of the story.

Gold stars for Alix E. Harrow because she has yet to disappoint me with any of her books, novellas, or short stories! What makes her work even more impressive is that all her stories are so different from each other. There isn't such a thing as a "typical" Harrow book and I feel like that versatility is something that makes her books very fresh. The Six Deaths of the Saint is Harrow's darkest book yet. The palette is very limited and that works perfectly considering the length of the short story. There is a lot of physicality to the story, given that it's about war and the relationship between the soldiers and the people calling the shots. A lot of thematic resonance to The Poppy War and The Locked Tomb trilogy. Harrow does not shy away from the topic or sugar coat it, the ugliness and terribleness seep through the pages, but at the same time, the gore isn't oversaturated for the thrill factor.

I'm usually super picky about short stories and I rarely ever like them, because mostly they don't manage to convey the depth in 30-50 pages. The Six Deaths meanwhile, is brimming with emotions. The whole story only works because the writer was able to convey the main character's and Gwynne's emotions so well. Imagine being ride or die for a couple only introduced in a handful of pages! Another reason why I instantly loved this was that it was timey wimey and everyone knows I eat that shit up.

Apparently, this short story is an experiment for a proper novel the author might later write, and I have to say I'll be down to read it for sure! The strength of The Six Deaths does lie in its short and concise length but I am curious to how she would handle a full novel.

Disclaimer: Thank you to the author for sending me an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Content Warnings:
War, death, and violence, on the page, described with some detail; child neglect; physical violence against a child; death of a major character 

 4.25 stars
Damn them violent delights do have violent ends. Willy boy was spitting facts. Ok so I really enjoyed this book. It's a perfect thriller with the right amount of suspense and pacing. I was hooked just from reading the Prologue! Extremely chilling and twisted, These Violent Delights does not shy away from the monstrosity that is teenage obsessive love. Paul and Julian had nothing on Joe and Love from You and I'm not even exaggerating. These two were hella sick. Imagine Joe and Love but as college students and lots more pretentious.

The writing is far beyond what you would normally expect from a debut novelist. It captures the theme and atmosphere of their obsession so beautifully. The entire book has this claustrophobic and suffocating vibe to it, which not only helps the pacing but also makes the reader feel like they are stuck in this toxic relationship with Paul and Julian. Apart from some acquaintances and family members that mainly serve as background and plot devices, the two MCs are the only characters that we really get to know or even read about. You can feel the spiraling obsession along with Paul and it's so well done, I have no words. Not too much on the nose, or insta-love, or loads of telling. Just perfect. Honestly, most romances fail to build up a relationship this well, but Nemerever was able to do it smoothly for THE toxic couple of the year!

The social psychology nerd in me was physically vibrating with excitement when the Milgram experiment was mentioned. Cue a gif of an anime character pushing up glasses. I remember when I took a course in Psychology at college and I remember our entire class refusing to believe the result. I do want to clarify one thing. there were 2 experiments carried out: one with 43 undergrads from Yale who weren't paid to participate, and the second with 50 men from a variety of works of life. So Julian's point about the haute bourgeois having no sense of consequences for their actions only holds partially true. In both studies, the participants were all men. Draw whatever conclusion from that as you will...

There's also a lot of foreshadowing that I love in thrillers and especially dark academia books because of the focus on literature. You can't write a decent dark academia thriller if you don't add thematic parallels and narrative resonance. That's the entire charm of the genre! (apart from the aesthetic ofc lol) I loved how it really did mirror Shakespearan plays plus the theme of the doomed lovers from Romeo and Juliet. The dramatic irony running throughout the novel is nicely tied up in a really poetic ending, once again bringing back the concept of the doomed lovers. Though once again, the endless debate exists: were they doomed because of the overreaching arms of Fate (who they were as people), or because of the choices they made? 

 2 stars
DNF @ 70%
They let me, a clout-less fool, read the sapphic space pirates book!! And it turned out to be basic af. I'd heard a lot about this on twitter, so I was very excited when Netgalley approved my request for an ARC. My main issue with this book is that it lacks substance. The characters and the plot is flimsy and plain, there wasn't a single character that I liked, they all seemed tropey and flat. I was interested in the world building but there was barely any information provided, the villains were just cartoonishly evil. There was no subtle foreshadowing, everything was rather obvious in terms of how the plot would go. The one reason why I wanted to read this book was because of the sapphic pirates, and I was immediately let down by how insta-love the romance was. I'm sorry but I can never connect with the characters or the romance when they want to bang each other from the moment they meet. Might just be me, but it feels rather superficial.
Thank you to Gollancz and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own. 

I am so angry right now. I feel frustrated and I want to cry and hit something because I wanted to like this book SO bad and was so excited about it, but I ended up despising it with my entire being. This should have been a duology is all I can say. A smart editor could have easily condensed it into a 500-pages each book, and that would have done wonders for pacing. There is no easy way to say this: but this book sucked big time. The plot is all over the place, I had no idea what Novik was trying to pull with a novel where the characters spend 25% of the time in airplanes... yup, I'm not even kidding. I was annoyed throughout by the shit ton of expositioning and mindless telling that would go on. There would be three whole pages of info dumping between two dialogues, to the point that I would have forgotten what even the conversation was about. Honestly, I spent the majority of this book simply dissociated. My brain just telling me again and again, "this is boring. why are we doing this again? oh, what are the characters talking about??"

Once again, a lot of the plot would have unfolded beautifully if this book could have been condensed into the previous book. But then again a lot of the plot twists (all of them except one) were pretty damn obvious. And I am not trying to show off how smart I was in figuring stuff out. There were legit reviews and questions on Goodreads around the time book 1 came out that easily predicted how stuff would go down and they were 98% spot on! One thing I absolutely despise is when the author takes the readers to be complete idiots. Yes, a lot of us are duds but give us the benefit of the doubt! I like books that encourage readers to do a bit of heavy lifting and don't just present the story the way Novik does here. A fuck ton of telling and not showing.

My favorite thing about the previous book was the characters and the relationships between them. I've always believed that Novik is a master at writing female friendships, and El, Aadhya, Liu, and Chloe's friendship was my favorite from The Last Graduate. The Golden Enclaves meanwhile, throws the intricately built relationships into a dumpster fire by introducing random new characters that we are supposed to suddenly care about. Honestly, the only constant in this trilogy has been my love for Gwen Higgins and I had been so excited to finally have Gwen get her screen time, but that turned out to be a broken dream as well. She was just as cool as I imagined her to be, and honestly, that's the only reason this got 2 stars instead of 1. That and the fact that this series had so much potential when book 1 came out but it all went downhill from there mainly due to poor pacing and shitty editing/marketing choices.

Maybe this will come across as a satisfying conclusion to the Scholomance trilogy, I however found this to be a complete and utter waste of my time and an insult to my intelligence. Probably going to stick to Novik's standalone stuff because that's where she seems to be at least decent.


Before reading:
I can't believe I was lured into reading another book that ended on a MASSIVE cliffhanger; one might think I would have learned better after Uncle Rick pulled the same stunt at the end of The Mark of Athena, but here I am again...We better get a pub date of early-mid 2022 😐