tachyondecay's reviews
2024 reviews

What’s better than a book about vampires? How about a book about a book series about vampires—that might turn out to be real? Kate Stayman-London combines fanfic with spicy vampire sex and no small amount of peril in Fang Fiction. I received an eARC via NetGalley thanks to being a host of Prophecy Girls podcast.

Tess drops out of grad school after someone else in her program sexually assaults her. She takes solace in her favourite fantasy series, Blood Feud. Tess doesn’t think much of the fan conspiracy theory that the vampires from the books are real. Then Octavia Yoo, one such vampire, shows up at the hotel where Tess works. She finds herself drafted to seek out Octavia’s brother, Callum, who is as dangerous as he is hot. Meanwhile, Octavia reluctantly teams up with Tess’s former roommate and best friend. Across two separate places, these women must solve the mystery of how Octavia escaped the Isle, who August Lirio is, and how they can reunite the Yoo siblings.

Fang Fiction didn’t land for me at first. Stayman-London’s characterization is sharp and lacks much subtlety. Tess and Joni gush over Blood Feud; the vampire characters, like Octavia and Callum, are melodramatic AF. Everything is cranked up to eleven, but nothing feels real. It feels flimsy, goofy, like I’m watching season 1 Buffy all over again.

Slowly but surely, however, the book won me over. First and foremost is Stayman-London’s depiction of Tess’s trauma following her rape. For a book that is otherwise tongue-in-cheek to the point of distraction, Fang Fiction deals with rape with incredible grace and sensitivity. Tess’s spiral, which is where we basically meet her after the book’s prologue, and her reluctance to talk to Joni about her rape feels so real and poignant. Stayman-London does an excellent job of showing why a survivor might withdraw from the world and from her friends. She succeeds in showing the ongoing harm that persists despite the actual event being over. For a book that otherwise seems to land firmly in the romantasy genre, this darker thread adds pathos.

The romantic parts, of course, didn’t do much for me. More invested romantasy readers might enjoy it, though this is a slow burn romance that takes a long time to get to the spicy parts. The wrong Prophecy Girl might have read this book, though—when I typed out and sent Steph a lengthy, steamy passage from later in the book, her ears metaphorically perked up. For what it’s worth, I can understand, intellectually, the heat in these pages.

The somewhat meta “fan fiction” idea is intriguing but fizzles, in my opinion, amidst the chaos of the climax. The actual Big Bad proves predictable, and the confrontation itself is underwhelming. This book doesn’t really do much when it comes to exploring the nature of vampires or their mythos beyond the bits and pieces Stayman-London needs for the story.

Fang Fiction is enjoyable, hot even if that is your thing. Romantasy readers, Buffy fans, are the right target audience, and I don’t want to damn this with faint praise: this book is full of charm and wit and intense moments that are going to satisfy. That being said, whether it’s Stayman-London’s characterization style or her plotting, this book never quite achieved its full potential in my eyes.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Nicole Maines as Nia Nal/Dreamer in Supergirl was a revelation in more ways than one, and I have loved following her on Twitter even as that site slides deeper into the abyss. So when I heard she had a memoir, It Gets Better … Except When It Gets Worse, coming out, of course I needed to read it. Thanks to NetGalley and publisher Dial Press for the eARC.

As the introduction establishes, this is Maines’s story, on her terms and in her (ghostwritten) words. Her story had previously been told by Amy Ellis Nutt in Becoming Nicole, which I haven’t read. Maines doesn’t criticize Nutt or that book too much, simply remarking—correctly—that its perspective is different from her own. It Gets Better … Except When It Gets Worse is raw and unvarnished. In sharing her life up to this point, her ambivalence about being thrust into activism amid pursuing her acting, Maines also takes aim at the expectations we (fans, especially queer fans) put on actors and high-profile activists. In a world where we are eternally expecting inspiration porn, Maines steadfastly refuses to give us our fix. Respect.

The first few chapters are achingly familiar to anyone who has read other trans memoirs: Maines realizing she is a girl at a very young age, her parents grappling with this understanding and its implications not only for her but for her twin brother and their entire family. Fortunately, her parents (particularly her mom, from the beginning) are supportive, fighting for Maines’s rights at school—her first brush with fame was as a plaintiff in a case against a Maine school board over bathroom rights—and even moving to send her to a more inclusive school. The fact that Maines’s childhood experience of transition was so tumultuous in spite of continual parental support only serves to highlight how truly awful it must be for trans kids with less supportive families.

Maines came of age in an interesting time for trans rights, as she herself notes in these chapters. In the beginning her mom really has to search even for the vocabulary to describe what Maines is going through, but by the time Maines is graduating high school, transgender has become a household term. It feels like in the last ten years we’ve gone through this whirlwind of rising awareness, tentative acceptance, and now pernicious backlash, and you feel it reading this book. After fighting for her rights in childhood, Maines’s frustration being right back at square one in her adulthood comes across so strongly here.

The most interesting parts of the book for me were towards the end, as Maines discusses breaking into acting and eventually being cast in Supergirl. I didn’t really know much about how she got into acting. She just showed up one day on my TV, a trans actor playing a trans character, and stole my heart. Nia Nal’s evolution on screen, including the trans rights storylines the show played out, were pivotal in helping me understand and accept I am trans; I literally named myself Kara after the show’s main character (I was well chuffed to learn from this book that Maines did something similar in naming herself after a Zoey 101 character).

It isn’t surprising to hear, in her own words, that Maines struggled with imposter syndrome, etc., while she started acting on the show. I applaud her for being honest about it—there are echoes here of what I read in Anna Kendrick’s memoir this summer. Acting is a far more demanding and destabilizing profession than we often know, and social media and celebrity culture has warped our understanding of what the life of the average actor is like. And this is where It Gets Better … Except When It Gets Worse truly gets interesting.

Maines minces no words in her criticism of the toxic segments of Supergirl fandom: specifically, some shippers who take their OTPs way too seriously. She doesn’t play favourites—from Karamel to Supercorp (the latter being my ship, if I have to pick one, but I am actually kind of happy Kara is alone at the end of the series), each ship has a small but vocal contingent who attacked the cast and crew any time the show didn’t seem to be going their way. I remember this well, even if I was always on the outskirts because I don’t venture places like AO3. The Supergirl hashtags were a good place for community for me on Twitter back in those days, especially around conversation about queerness and queer representation—so it sucks that some fans took things way too far.

But Maines goes even further. On the topic of Dreamer, the original character designed for her, whom she has ported over into the comics and been writing for the past few years, Maines confesses to some frustration with how Dreamer was developed on the show. She wanted a darker, edgier character—and is realizing this in her comic stories (which I haven’t and probably won’t read). For example, there is a notable episode where Dreamer has to take on an anti-trans villain. She nearly kills him, which would be against Supergirl’s code, of course. Maines is like, “Dreamer should have killed him! It makes sense.” And, like, I won’t pretend to agree with that because I happen to like the squeaky-clean approach to justice the CW Supergirl took, in contrast to something like Arrow.

But I love it for Nicole. I love that she sat down to write this book and said (not a direct quote), “Fuck being the good girl, the politic one, the nice trans woman. Fuck being inspirational, feel-good, or positive. Things suck right now, and I want to tell everyone why they suck, and I don’t want to pretend I don’t want to be out for blood.” Maines makes it clear: she wants the freedom to be messy. Some of y’all (especially white cis people) might not realize how subversive this is, but anyone belonging to an underrepresented group in media gets it: the pressure to be well behaved, to be “good,” can be overwhelming at times.

I respect this. We want to lionize people, call them trailblazers, simply for existing—or fighting for the barest sliver of human dignity. I want to call Maines inspirational. I feel an affinity for her, even though I’m older and my experience with transition is incredibly different and I am ace whereas she is incredibly horny on main (and I am here for it). Somehow, her attitude and her outlook resonate with me; this book is no exception. Out of respect to her wishes, however, I’m trying my best not to put her on that pedestal.

So instead I want to say this: It Gets Better … Except When It Gets Worse is a messy book. It refuses to be the feel-good memoir you hope for from a young actor or a trans celebrity. While the ingredients are there—the sad, low moments, and the triumphant ones—Maines doesn’t want to assemble them into a satisfying meal. She wants you to feel unbalanced. She does say she wants trans readers to feel seen (and I do), but she is also exhausted by the political upheaval of the last five years, and she will not hold back. I admire this, and I really appreciate this attempt to short-circuit the narratives around actors and activists like herself.

At various points in reading this, I felt entertained, uplifted, triggered, saddened, shocked, and impressed. In that sense, this is a very human book. Nicole Maines is a trans woman, and a lot of this book is about that—but she’s also a young woman in her twenties, at the start of her adult life and her career, shouting into the void, and this book is also about that. There’s more here than just her thoughts on trans rights and trans life, just as there is more to Maines than Dreamer or being trans or being mouthy on Twitter. I love memoirs that contain multitudes.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

This book has fucked me up in subtle ways I might spend months if not years untangling. C.L. Clark has written a kind of book I have always wanted to write, a fantasy novel speaking to the present day even as its secondary world setting remains a colonial, nineteenth-century one. With unlikeable protagonists and unenviable no-win scenarios, The Unbroken is a deliberate hot mess. I didn’t love it. I didn’t even want to like it.

I can’t stop thinking about it.

Touraine is a lieutenant in the Balladairan colonial army. Kidnapped from her home country of Qazāl as a small child, she is part of the Sands, a unit comprised of her fellow foreign conscripts. Now the Sands have returned “home,” their unit accompanying Balladaire’s bloodiest general and Crown Princess Luca, eager to make her mark as a leader so that she can finally unseat her regent uncle and accede to Balladaire’s throne. Circumstances lead to Touraine and Luca starting as allies before becoming enemies and then allies (frenemies?) again. And then enemies. And then … look, you get the idea.

Let’s start with just how many notes The Unbroken hits perfectly. It’s a queernorm fantasy that’s nevertheless full of discrimination, conflict, and hatred. It’s a postcolonial fantasy that has a sympathetic monarch main character even as it critiques that entire institution without an ounce of clemency. It’s a story of never coming home, finally coming home, wishing you hadn’t come home, and fucking everything up trying to come home.

Purely by chance, I read this immediately following Empire of Sand. I’ll repeat what I said in my review of that book: we are in renaissance of fantasy. And I’ll add: that renaissance is largely driven by authors of colour, who have been hard at work reshaping mainstream fantasy from a fluffy, sanitized version of Europe into something with teeth. From N.K. Jemisin to Tracey Deonn, and now Tasha Suri and C.L. Clark—fantasy proliferates now with incredibly diverse voices that aren’t afraid to break down the status quo of the genre.

When I was younger, I had this whole idea for a fantasy novel—I won’t explain it here, mostly because one day I still might write it, but suffice it to say it included the protagonist plotting revolution against a queen who happened to be her best friend because, you know, democracy. At seventeen, I understood it was weird my favourite genre could tell beautiful stories about Good triumphing over Evil, yet they still always ended with a feudal society full of class divisions and ruled by a monarch. So it shouldn’t be a surprise I am loving postcolonial fantasy and how it gives zero fucks about pretending a functioning monarchy is a good place to live.

In this way, Luca is a difficult character to like in The Unbroken. As Touraine quite rightly says to her face at one point, she is the epitome of privilege in this world. Her complaint is that her power-hungry uncle isn’t giving power to her, basically. Clark expertly portrays her as a kind of well-meaning white saviour: she thinks she can “help” the people of Qazāl, but only within the framework of empire; her worldview doesn’t let her imagine anything different.

Touraine, then, becomes the perfect foil. A survivor of colonial abduction, deprogramming herself in her homeland even as her own people treat her with suspicion, Touraine seems like a natural candidate for heroine as well as protagonist. Except she sucks just as bad as Luca! To be fair, her flaws are probably more personal than political, but her role in the story means her personal flaws have massive political consequences, so it all comes out the same, basically.

It has been a long time since I have yelled at a book as much as I yelled at Touraine every single time she was at a fork in the road and took the worst possible path down each. Every. Time. She is the Jon Snow of this world, and like Jon Snow, she knows nothing. Also like Jon, she fails upward.

So with two unlikeable protagonists who mess everything up, why is The Unbroken so good? Because Clark clearly means it to be a mess. I’m sure there’s some readers who will ship Touraine and Luca as a disaster couple, but honestly, I don’t think we are supposed to read them that way. They are just disasters, full stop, individually and together. This is a fantasy novel that truly embraces just how chaotic the disintegration of empire is while at the same time telling a coherent story, and it works really well.

I don’t want to read the next book. But I also can’t look away. That’s what I am trying to say here: The Unbroken seared itself on my soul because it does so much right that even as I want to plug my ears and say, “Nope, not interested, give me the cozy fantasy again please,” I can’t help myself. I’m part of the revolution now. Let’s go.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

A while back I had the opportunity to read The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri and was thrilled to discover she had more titles to her name. We are truly living in a renaissance of high fantasy, and in particular, there is something special happening with the main character energy. Empire of Sand is no exception.

Mehr is the illegitimate daughter of an Ambhan governor. She has done her best to remember what her mother could pass down of Amrithi teachings, yet she knows she doesn’t belong in either world. Maneuvered into a political marriage so that the supreme religious leader of the Ambhan Empire can use her Amrithi magic to stay in power, Mehr seemingly has no choice, no agency. She has to fight and claw and scrabble, metaphorically and literally, her way to freedom—from men, from religion, from cultural oppression, from everything and everyone who would define her and shape her for their own ends.

Mehr reminds me a lot of Malini from The Jasmine Throne, albeit with far less power despite similar levels of privilege. She is such a fascinating character. I found her sympathetic yet not particularly likeable; indeed, she’s a bit boring. Yet this leads to such a careful, complex characterization. Mehr’s heritage and social status means she wields almost no power herself, yet she is sheltered from the hardships other Amrithi, and lower-class Ambhan women, experience on a daily basis. This much is made clear early in the book, especially through her encounter with a servant she ill-uses—the theme of “using” people for one’s own ends becomes particularly poignant as the story goes on.

In this way, Suri belies the usual, simplistic narratives about discrimination and power. Surface-level depictions of discrimination often flatten someone’s identities and the axes along which they experience oppression. But real life is so much more complicated. I’m trans and experience oppression as a result, yet I am also white, which makes me less marginalized; like Mehr, I have one type of privilege (several, actually, but let’s not brag) that insulates me from some of the oppression experienced by people with whom I share marginalized identities. It’s tough to write stories like this, and I love how Suri moves through the layers of Mehr’s identity.

Mehr’s relationship with Amun was less interesting to me. If you are more into romantasy, of course, this might be exactly your vibe: reluctant marriage to someone you don’t particularly like, etc. I get what Suri is trying to do here (I think), and I don’t want to pan it just because it isn’t for me. Amun is just such a moody mopey guy. If you like that, pick up the book already.

I was more interested in the power dynamic between Mehr and the Maha. There’s so much more to this world than Suri allows us to see from the narrator’s very limited perspective perched on Mehr’s shoulder—and honestly, that’s fine. But I love what Suri has set up here: an ancient leader who has perverted the magic of a people not his own in order to literally reshape the world to suit him and his imperial progeny. It’s just the right balance of epic and twisted, ambitious and odious.

Mehr is just the right person to come along and screw it all up.

Empire of Sand is very much a debut novel, with Suri’s more recent works a clear improvement in terms of skill. Yet the echoes of this book reverberate in those newer novels. I wasn’t initially going to read the sequel (like I said, I don’t actually like Mehr all that much), but I’m kind of intrigued to see what her sister, Arwa, gets up to as the main character.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Hot on the heels of my ecstatic review of Renegades, I bring you the sequel! Which I didn’t realize was the second in a trilogy (I thought it was a duology for some reason), but it shows. Archenemies is peak middle book syndrome. Aside from that, however, it’s basically what it says on the tin, and I’m not mad about it. Marissa Meyer continues to unspool this story of superpowered prodigies, divided loyalties, and dangerous obsessions.

Spoilers for the first book but not for this one!

Nova continues her life as a double agent within the Renegades: Insomnia to them, Nightmare to her Anarchist found family. Her goal? Retrieve Ace Anarchy’s helmet, once believed destroyed but now under lock and key in the Renegade Tower. As pieces fall into place that bring Nova closer to this goal, an unfortunate wrinkle develops: she is actually having feelings for Adrian. Gross! Seriously though—this is actually a cute, slow-burn romance that this aromantic gal has few issues with.

Everything I liked about Renegades is still present in Archenemies. We learn a little more about Max’s power and how the senior Renegades have chosen to deploy it. The Renegade leadership continues to walk the line between well-meaning and overbearing in the decisions it makes for “the greater good.” While their slow march towards more overtly fascist leadership feels obvious to me, I reminded myself this is a young-adult novel. From that perspective, I think Meyer is doing a good job exploring the way grey morality and conflicting loyalties can cause people to rationalize doing terrible things, whether it’s for the greater good or simply to right what they perceive as a wrong against a loved one.

In this respect, Nova’s role as a conflicted protagonist is crucial. She remains incredibly sympathetic because we understand her motives—moreover, she retains a sense of right and wrong the other Anarchists don’t seem to have preserved. Her interactions with Max, Oscar, Ruby, and Adrian always underscore this, setting her at odds with the Anarchists more than once, even as she strives to fulfill her mission on behalf of her uncle.

I enjoyed seeing the relationships among side characters, such as Oscar and Ruby’s romance, develop slightly here. I would have liked to see Nova develop more friendships beyond Adrian or the group dynamic within her team. Give me some female friendship between Nova and Ruby. Give me some competitive bonding moments between Nova and Oscar. Something.

However, the book is tightly edited and still quite long (and felt like it dragged in places), so I suppose such scenes, even if they were written, might have been cut.

Archenemies quite artfully raises the stakes of the previous book and continues to plunge Nova—and by extension, the reader—deeper into moral conflict. Yet something about it didn’t satisfy me as much as the first book. I labelled it “second book syndrome” in my intro, and I think I’m right. Or to be more precise, this book raises the stakes but doesn’t really elevate the world Meyer built for us in Renegades. We still haven’t seen or heard much of anything beyond Gatlon City. Though there are new threats now to prodigies, we haven’t explored Nova’s powers much more than we did in the first book. So as a sequel and a novel, Archenemies is serviceable. As a work of superhero drama, it’s missing out on some of the super stuff. Meyer doesn’t push that dimension forward as much as I’d like (but maybe that’s just me).

Entirely recommended if you liked the first book, but I am glad I started with the first book!

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

When I try to explain why I read Emily St. John Mandel’s books, I don’t ever have a cogent explanation. “She’s Canadian,” I mumble, as if I am somehow bound by CRTC Cancon requirements. “She never writes two novels the same,” I grasp at straws of justification. Why do I feel the need to justify? Probably because her novels straddle genre with an uncomfortable liminality: science fiction but not science fiction, fantasy but not fantasy. The Glass Hotel was science fiction, I thought, but turned out to be fantasy, except not.

Summarizing this book is a challenge. The jacket copy doesn’t do the plot justice. The plot doesn’t do the plot justice. Mandel spins this tale in a spiralling, telescopic way: each chapter follows a different character, many of them new or one-offs. We start with Paul, see a traumatic incident from his university days, and then leave him behind, only meeting him briefly again as a minor character before he comes back for another POV chapter near the end. Vincent, Paul’s half-sister, is nominally the novel’s main character, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call her a protagonist. While the book returns to her more often than most, it is also content to spin her off while chasing other subplots.

Arguably the central story here is that of a banal antagonist, Jonathan Alkaitis, whose Ponzi scheme’s collapse forms the core event around which everything else revolves. Mandel seems interested in our relationship with money: the need for it to survive, the want for it to flourish, the unease we feel when we have too little or too much, the ways others prey upon us. Alkaitis is portrayed as a perfectly ordinary, nice guy, who just happens to be defrauding his investors—including a family friend who expects to live off her investment as retirement income. He knows when the scheme collapses she will be destitute; yet he keeps going. Sociopathic? No, not really. Alkaitis is more like a personification of the indeterminate apathy of a generation of money-making men disconnected from what makes money.

Really, The Glass Hotel might be best viewed as a series of vignettes following several people: Vincent, Paul, Alkaitis, Olivia, Walter, et al. Mandel keeps the “camera” tight on the individual, the third-person perspective so limited it almost squeezes everyone and everything out of frame, an intense character study. I think what kept me reading is simply that her writing is so … focused. Precise. It’s not even that it’s lush or particularly skillful in a rhetorical or linguistic sense; nevertheless, the craft is visible.

And, despite myself and my basic dislike of novels that turn out not really to be novels, I liked this book. I enjoyed spending time with Alkaitis and his Ponzi scheme (what can I say, I love scammers). I enjoyed the harried assistant, ignorant of what she was assisting. The stuff with Vincent on the ship and her disappearance was a bit meh. Paul was just odd. But there were a lot of points in this book where I found myself chuckling, turning the page because I was really invested—not so much in what happened next, I guess, but rather in how Mandel was going to switch things up on me.

So I don’t want to give The Glass Hotel a bad review or rating, for it is a good book. It’s just weird (in a good way). It defies description, and by that I mean, Mandel set out to tell a story her way, without much caring about the conventions of a linear narrative or how we tend to cast a novel. I hesitate to call it experimental—it didn’t frustrate me the way a lot of experimental stuff does. Call it a small departure. Someone shooting in black-and-white in the era of colour. Read it for the characters, for the vignettes, for the scrutiny of human emotion—just don’t expect a single plot or character who ties it all together. Don’t expect a bow on top.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Have you wondered what would happen if we lived in a world where Elizabeth Holmes was actually competent? Or if she somehow managed to fail upwards, like Elon Musk, despite being a woman? You’re Safe Here posits a wealthy female supervillain, a disgruntled coder, and a pregnant girlfriend chasing solitude in lieu of enlightenment. Leslie Stephens looks to draw together the disparate threads of quantified wellness, middle-class yuppie obsession with individualism, and the classic trope of not wanting to talk to one’s partner about important stuff.

Maggie is preggers and decides it’s the best to embark on a six-week jaunt in a WellPod adrift in the Pacific Ocean. Her partner, Noa, is a programmer at the company launching the pods—but she spots a problem and tries to sound an alarm. As their respective storylines unfold, Stephens also dives into their respective backstories, their relationship, and some of the life of Emmett, the enigmatic founder behind it all….

This is a weird book. It straddles the line between thriller and thought experiment, but like so many literary attempts at what is ultimately a form of science fiction, it often falls flat and ends up sounding like so much empty noise. There’s a kind of absurdist fatalism to the story that left me off balance the entire time. On one hand, so many of the twists (such as the identity of Gamma) felt imminently predictable. On the other hand, the plot careens forward without truly stopping to shore up the main characters, their feelings, and indeed their motivations.

When I went into this book, I thought it was more on the horror end of thriller—and that’s on me for that misapprehension, yet I can’t help but feel let down. None of the characters work for me. Maggie and Noa have a terrible relationship, and it’s weird that they don’t know how to act like adults and talk to each other. No one ever comments on the cheating in this book like it’s, you know, wrong. It’s just happening.

Emmett is also a really disappointing villain. Stephens set her up as quite arch, yet in the end her plans are cozily small-E evil in that they really only involve Maggie. The soapy twist that Maggie is Emmett’s daughter separated-at-birth is, as I said, somewhat predictable and also … unfulfilling.

It just feels like Stephens is trying to have her cake and eat it too. If You’re Safe Here is meant to be a serious deconstruction of how individualized wellness tech is dehumanizing us and cutting us off from each other, then the WellPods need to be more overtly sinister than they actually are. All we really get are a few hints—like with Maggie’s disaffected mother. If, on the other hand, this is supposed to be a more intimate portrait of the lengths one might go to reunite their family, I would have wanted a more sympathetic slant on Emmett.

The ending, instead, is a hot mess of mixed up tropes. Noa and Maggie don’t get closure. Emmett gets no comeuppance, and no one ever challenges the WellPods-as-apps-on-steroids metaphor. That is to say—what is the point here?

You’re Safe Here is a perfect example of what happens when you hand someone a lot of tropes as ingredients and say, “Write a compelling novel.” Like cooking, writing is more than just following a recipe. There’s technique. I’m not sure what technique Stephens used here, but it doesn’t work.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

I have followed Meg Vondriska on Twitter for a while now, and when I heard she was coming out with a book based on the concept of her @MenWritingWomen account, I ran, not walked, to the bookshop (well, I emailed them) to preorder. A Tale of Two Titties takes the basic concept of this account, amplifies it, but also twists it into something far more subversive and acerbic. The result is entertaining and potentially genuine helpful, albeit at times repetitive.

The book is loosely organized into chapters based on common issues with how women are portrayed in fiction. From anatomically impossible descriptions of breasts (or other parts of AFAB bodies) to stereotypical roles for women, this book covers the various ways men (because it is almost exclusively cis men) write. Set up, in jest, as a course for an aspiring author to write better, A Tale of Two Titties doesn’t hold back.

The book is at its best, in my opinion, when Vondriska lambastes specific examples of terrible writing of women. However, I also understand one cannot make an entire book out of quotes from other people’s writing (or at least, then it would be a sassy concordance and not a writing “advice” book). Vondriska has smartly chosen to expand the premise of the original account into something more suitable for a book length. Walking the line between parody and real advice is challenging, however.

A Tale of Two Titties is a joyfully creative subversion of sexist tropes. Vondriska goes beyond merely critiquing or lampooning how men write women and elevates her schtick to a new plane. There are exercises in every chapter to prepare the reader to write their breast. I particularly enjoyed a flowchart, “Genre Detour,” to help define which genre one is writing based on the presence of women and descriptions of their bodies. All of this is to say, this book’s parody works because it’s just so damn inventive.

However, I’m not sure the people who most need this book fall into its audience. Women are more likely to pick up this book in terms of its marketing and style, yet they aren’t the ones who need to read this. I nodded along, and while maybe there’s one or two points the book makes that you might not have realized, you will too. Men who want to write better female characters but aren’t sure how might not see this book, or consider to to be “for” them. Perhaps this is merely a marketing issue more than an issue with the book. It doesn’t detract from my enjoyment.

I don’t really have much else to say about this one. If you’re down for this style of humour, you’re going to enjoy this!

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Last year I took a chance on reading Devil’s Gun, the sequel to You Sexy Thing, even though I hadn’t read the first book. This was a big chance, for Cat Rambo’s fiction up to that point hadn’t worked for me. Fortunately, I loved Devil’s Gun enough to accept the offer of an eARC of the first book as well, and now I’ve read it too. With the amount of time that has elapsed, I actually don’t remember much of the sequel, which is kind of perfect in that I had no idea how this one was going to end!

Niko Larssen is the owner and nominal head chef of the Last Chance restaurant. Her employees are, for the most part, former members of her squad within the army of the Holy Hive Mind. They are now retired—supposedly—though not out of reach of this formidable entity. Disaster strikes on the eve of what could have been a great triumph for Niko and the Last Chance. She and her crew find themselves aboard a petulant bioship that thinks they’re trying to steal it. Saddled with a food critic who is more than she seems and an imperial heir mailed to Niko as cargo just before the disaster, this ragtag group must work hard to stay together and thwart the whims of a pirate out for revenge.

Everything I liked about Devil’s Gun is present in some form here. I don’t remember if the second book has the same omniscient narration. It’s not technically omniscient so much as it is a fast-switching type of limited third person. It works fine here, though the formatting of my ebook didn’t separate when the omniscient narrator switches perspective, and that can be confusing sometimes. Rambo also pulls a fast one in the sense that there are definitely some viewpoints we don’t see—Gio, Milly, Dabry, etc. This isn’t a criticism, of course. I appreciate Rambo leaving some questions open.

You can read these two books in any order, as far as I am concerned. Both scratch the itch of wanting a space opera that is loose in its affiliations. This story isn’t about the political machinations and military movements of a nation. It’s about family, in a way that might appeal to fans of Becky Chambers. Getting to see the genesis of You Sexy Thing’s sentience and personality (including its obsession with printing its logo on everything) is fun. Watching Atlanta become part of the family is likewise very touching.

I would gladly read many more novels set in this universe, with this crew.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Last year I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Daughter of the Moon Goddess, Sue Lynn Tan’s reimagining of the mythology of Chang’e (and specifically, her daughter). I was apprehensive whether Tan would bottle moonlight twice with Heart of the Sun Warrior—yet here we are, another five-star read. What can I say? Tan’s storytelling abilities are impressive.

Some time has passed since the end of the first book. Xingyin is living fairly contently on the moon with her mother, who is now free to leave whenever she pleases, though she still has the duty of lighting all the lanterns that illuminate the moon each night. Liwei, heir to the Celestial throne, continues to court Xingyin and make moves towards proposing. Yet Xingyin knows Liwei’s parents are no fans of hers, and this is confirmed when she begrudgingly attends a birthday celebration at the Jade Palace. An engineered slight puts the moon goddess—and her daughter—on the back foot again as they ultimately become ensnared in a much larger attempt on the throne. Xingyin and her allies—including some unexpected ones—must fight back against a usurper who only has evil in his heart. But this war might cost Xingyin all of the precious love she has gained since her previous victory, and there is no guarantee even of success.

Spoilers for both books in this review.

Tan’s writing continues to be operatic in form and epic in scope. Once again we are thrust into a rich world. As she brings elements of Chinese mythology to life, she uses them to tell a broad and adventurous story. The stakes—the Celestial throne and stability of the entire immortal world—could not be higher.

The love triangle of Xingyin with Liwei and Wenzhi is back,

and once again, this aromantic reader did not mind the romance here. Additionally, the appearance of

Houyi

and his return to the immortal realm is very touching. At first, I thought it was a bit trite, until I really dug into the book and understood the genre and form in which Tan is operating.

I won’t attempt to get too technical here, because I haven’t read or watched a lot of Chinese drama. But I feel like Heart of the Sun Warrior kind of has everything? This is best demonstrated at the climax of the book, when

Xingyin is about to go up against Wugang with the ultimate subterfuge. Wenzhi helps her, and Liwei finally gives his rival a grudging nod of respect—they will never be friends, not after what Wenzhi has done, but suddenly we have the Celestial Prince and the Demon Prince on the same side, fighting in a war together, and if that isn’t epic, I don’t know what is.

But you have to be able to get to that payoff, and this is where Tan excels.

This is a book that lays down groundwork and then pays it off. It’s seldom a surprise—foreshadowing is strong here—but it is always rewarding.

The dragons come back. The Celestial Empress baits Xingyin into a terrible promise, and then that comes full circle. Xingyin is caught between worlds—the worlds of the court and the moon, even the worlds of duty and family. What is she supposed to do? How come everything falls on her shoulders?

The death of Ping’er hits hard as well.

I love the ending. I love that Xingyin and Liwei don’t end up together. Sometimes you love someone, but it just doesn’t work out. You want too many different things. Xingyin and Wenzhi getting a second (third?) chance is perfect for this genre of story, even if, again, it feels trite. Tan has a masterful grasp of what is expected and works in a story like this.

As with the first book, I don’t feel like I have a lot of need to go into detail though. This book is a block of marble, expertly carved and exquisite from every angle. Definitely read the first book first, then do yourself a favour and pick this one up when you can. It’s a book where happy endings aren’t always the ones we expect or even desire, but they are the ones we need—and they are forever.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.