thebookbin's reviews
503 reviews

 It's easy to tell when certain traits are passed on through family. One of my oldest friends has the exact same sarcastic laugh as her brother. Another friend has a daughter that does the exact same expression of puppy eyes when she wants something. Me? Well, my mom buys stuff off instagram ads like nobody's business. While I don't do that exact same thing, I am easily influenced. 

So when I came across a tumblr post by @aplpaca about one of her favorite childhood series, I was cautiously intrigued. Then, while waiting for one of my other holds, I discovered my local library had the entire quartet, so I grabbed a copy of Inda, which I read in a single sitting, and I have no regrets (justice for Dogpiss). 

Where to even begin? One of my all time favorite tropes is books with child narrators when the books aren't necessarily for children (see: Ender's Game, This Tender Land, Dear Edward). I think children are such an underutilized point of view in books not aimed for children and Sherwood Smith manages it all so well, it's almost like there are two stories happening at once: one in the idyllic world of children and the other harsh light of adulthood. 

Inda (who gives Kaladin vibes for the Stormlight Archive fans) is such a singular title character. This first book focuses on his childhood from a bright-eyed second prince to an exiled privateer on the high seas, this book takes you places. Inda, while clearly the main character, is not the only POV character by far. The world Smith builds is fascinating, queernormative, and expansive. It's hard to encompass everything this book is in one short review, so I'll try and hone in on a few specifics. 

Smith is such a master of her craft that even the main antagonist, Aldren, most commonly referred to in the book as the Sierlaef, feels tragic. As a young boy with a disability and a distant father, it's so easy to see how in his desperate search for validation, he reaches for the poisonous influence of his uncle. No child should have to bear the weight of such responsibility, distance, and aloofness. As he grows and the adults around him fail him, and he rebuffs all pivotal moments of redemption and his inevitable descent into villainy becomes a tragedy. Just the right word here, a genuine friend there, and the Sierlaef would have grown to be a noble man, if not a good one. Instead, by the end of the novel he goes from misguided, angry teen to a selfish, dangerous, obsessed man. 

This book made me laugh, it made me cry. (Yes, I did cry real tears for a character named Dogpiss by his fellow child soldiers). The love depicted in this book—familial, friendship, duty—is exquisite. There aren't really any romantic relationships I can point to in this installment, most marriages are marriages of convenience or politics and romance isn't a factor. This is a book of loyalty, bonds, and destiny. I can't recommend it enough. 

★★★★★ JUSTICE FOR DOGPISS STARS 

 Is there a point in every girl's life when she is obsessed with disasters? I remember accidentally pulling an all-nighter watching tsunami videos only a few years ago. Maybe it was the fact that when I was in kindergarten when 9/11 happened, that year and every year after our teachers, media, and government set out on retraumatizing us every year, forcing us to watch videos of it, watch documentaries of the people who jumped to their deaths, forced us to revere the men who went to war to traumatize a whole new generation of children. And I've lived through a few disasters of my own. I survived Harvey in 2017. I survived getting caught in a tornado. Who wouldn't be curious? It's that curiosity that drove me to pick up The Unthinkable and in the end to be disappointed by its lackluster offering. 

Fundamentally, I think this book suffers as a product of its time. Published in 2008, and surely years in the making, this book cannot escape the perverse fascination of a post 9/11 world and all that it entails. Ripley spends an inordinate amount of time on the World Trade Center, survivors, and Ground Zero stories. Despite claiming to be interested in the average person, Ripley almost solely focuses on soldiers, policemen, and special forces stories and studies, and only scales her research to a white western audience, which she tacitly acknowledges.

Despite feeling a certain kinship with Ripley over our interest in disasters and how people respond to them, I found myself almost disgusted with how uncurious she seems to be about the most interesting questions she poses (and then abruptly brushes aside). At her core, Ripley is a bioessentialist and a skeptic. She believes in a rigid and inflexible binary that colors everything. You are the sum of the labels foisted upon you. Altruism is nothing except an evolutionary biproduct of breeding rituals: looking like a hero makes you appeal to the women around you—a woman being a hero? We don't do that here—and if you die being heroic then the women in your family will get more attention and therefore breed and make more babies ensuring your genetic material lives on. 

Ripley briefly acknowledges that men are more likely to be labeled as "heroes" as a by product of them having more dangerous jobs in general, or being more prone to engage in risky behavior but is so dispassionate about exploring the reasons why. Combined with her hero-worship of the people who do the most harm in this world: soldiers, police, and special forces, it seems like Ripley is trying her best to appease a male audience who won't take her seriously unless she engages in the imperialist circle-jerk of the military industrial complex. 

Ripley is also incapable of removing herself from the narrative, even though she claims to be a journalist. She dedicates an entire chapter to, bizarrely enough, the size of her amygdala. Instead of acknowledging her own humanity as a subjective and connective force of her storytelling, Ripley feels the need to insert herself into the narrative alongside the survivors she interviews, despite not being a survivor herself (or acknowledging herself as one). She's like a child at a birthday party, incessantly reminding everyone else it's her birthday next week. We can indulge you once or twice, but after that "Honey, it's not your turn. Let someone else have a go."

This is an ambitious work that falls short of its goal. Despite its claims it did not introduce me to my "disaster personality" nor did it pose any questions that I had not already asked myself as a person with an interest in disaster, who has survived one or two of her own. I can't quite tell if this work suffers as a product of its time, or if Ripley was simply a poor messenger for its delivery

★★ sad, uncurious stars 

 I honestly didn't know this book was self published until I came to write this review, but in hindsight this explains a few things about the book. This book is #4 in the series, and I have not read the first three, but that didn't dampen my experience with the novel at all. This is definitely a "you can just jump right in" kind of novel. 

The worldbuilding and magic system are unique and fascinating. I was captivated from the moment I read the prologue. The problem is, right after the prologue, we get a 14 year time-skip. If this author ever decided to reframe her works, she would be a high fantasy writer that was a household name. This book could have so easily been A Taste of Gold and Iron or A Strange and Stubborn Endurance but it falls a just short. With the focus being primarily on the relationship, a few things fell off to the wayside, namely this really cool magic bond that Vana and Daromir seem to have evolved. First of all, sharing each other's pain is the best setup for a hurt/comfort story that I ever heard. Then, for some reason that isn't really explored in-universe, their bond changes and they also share pleasure, which makes for interesting hanky-panky. Besides causing some slight relationship angst when Vana has to tell Daromir about the change in the bond, but that's it.

I would have been so interested to get a story that follows Vana and Daromir from their homeland to Draskora and their blossoming feelings from each other, I would have been in heaven. So much interesting content from those missing 14 years! That said, within the scope of the story this book tells, I think it does a pretty good job. I think the climax could have been a bit higher stakes, and the ending felt abrupt. The premise was so good, all I can really say is that I just wanted more from this novel!

★★★½ fantastic premise stars 

 Because Wolfsong got me out of a reading slump, I figured hey--why not? Let's jump right in to Ravensong. I am conflicted. I have feelings. This one definitely wasn't as good. Although, as a sidenote, it's really cool to view a writer at different points in their career and seen how they've grown. This is definitely one of Klune's earlier works. Where Wolfsong feels like a young gay teen's response to Twilight, Ravensong loses some of the nostalgic charm that I felt when reading Wolfsong. 

The first problem with this book is it's scope. It covers a lot of Gordo's childhood, which is very interesting except for when it mirrors Ox's childhood from the first book and it makes Thomas' motivations look insane. Then, we basically get to reread book 1 from a different perspective, which would have been cool, except it left out the bits I am most interested in: namely the aftermath of the first book and Gordo and Ox's reconciliation. I had to slog through all the boring details but then it somehow blasted through that important part again. Once can be written off as you needed to make cuts for word count (although I would have argued different sections deserved to get cut) but twice is just a sin. 

The reason this book feels like it was written by someone in high school is that it always chooses the option with the Most Possible Drama (except for when it doesn't--more on this later) but then when it tries to explain why this particular path was chosen there is no rational explanation so the rationale just falls off a cliff. Thomas goes from the gentle all-knowing patriarch to an unhinged egomaniac. In the first book, Ox gets left behind by the both the Bennetts and Gordo. When we go back in time to Gordo's childhood, we find out that Gordo was tattooed as a child by his father and Thomas' father (and nobody ad a problem with this) but they also left Gordo behind as a child and the intense psychological harm that did him. Which makes absolutely no sense as to why Gordo would turn around and do that same thing to the kid who he grew up with. 

The explanations for all of this behavior were so paltry. They left Gordo behind because humans had attacked wolves and Gordo was a human, albeit a witch. Why did that mean they had to cut all contact? Thomas' explanation: it was "easier." I'm sorry, that's just psychopathic and turns Thomas into a villain. Gordo was like 12 and his mother was just murdered and his father imprisoned. He had no one except these people and they left abruptly and cut all contact. It's unhinged. 

The other thing that made me knock off a star is Gordo losing his hand. Losing a hand adding an amputation and disability isn't the problem, in fact I think it could add a lot of interesting conflict to the story. My problem is Gordo's hand gets cut off and not only is it magically healed but 2 pages later, people are making jokes about it. Asking if he'll "need a hand" at the garage. He just had a major life-altering disability, and it wasn't given the gravitas it deserved. I wanted to witness Gordo's feelings, as someone whose career as a mechanic depends on his hands. I wanted to watch him adjust to life using his non-dominant hand. He lost the hand in the most dramatic fashion, but Klune didn't deal with any of the aftermath, and instead wrote it off. 

With the lack of depth in the story, and the weird scope of the book, retelling the entire events of the first book, and the nonsensical motivations of the characters, I don't believe I will be able to continue the series. While I enjoyed the first book and it helped get me out of my slump, I feel that both the writing style and the plot are just too juvenile for me at this time. 

 

★★½ WHAT IS WITH THE NONCONSENSUAL TATTOOING?! STARS 

So I stayed up until 2am finishing a book, so what? It's been a while since I've done that. I feel like that's what this book does-it's nostalgia and tropes wrapped up in one angst-filled wild ride. You can definitely tell Klune wrote this more at the start of his career, because it feels a little like something someone wrote in creative writing class. I say this because of the sheer angst. About 75% of this novel is just pure angst. It actually bothered that so little time and consideration was left to the post-angst consequences and comfort. The book only has 1 chapter of reconciliation after the very angsty and dramatic climax, and it is not enough time to come to terms emotionally with everything that happened. Gordo, Ox's brother-father figure doesn't even have any screen time in this last chapter to process anything and I feel cheated.

The pacing is off in other places, too. I don't understand why this book starts where it does. It starts on Ox's 16th birthday when he gets new neighbors and their 10 year old son latches onto him. The pace is slow and meandering as Ox integrates into their family, discovers tragic backstory, and his haunted by his own. The blurb mentions a tragic murder. It doesn't happen until about the 50% mark. From there, the love interest, Joe, splits off and they are separated. It's giving the New Moon depression montage. It's not until about 75% of the way through when Joe returns that feels like the true heart of the novel. I think a lot should have been trimmed on the front-end and more meat in the back end. While Ox growing up and learning to find his family is touching, I don't think it merited quite so much page-space, especially if the conflict resolution in the last half.

Also surprising: the sex scenes. I wasn't expecting them, I don't often read smut, but I found I really enjoyed these. I realized I could really feel the difference when a gay man was writing the scene--I feel as if most of the smut I do read is written by women. You could really tell a man who loves men wrote this.

I have very conflicting feeling about the age gap. 6 years isn't that much in the grand scheme of things, but they met when Ox was 16 and Joe was 10. Yes, there's weird wolf-magic that makes them like Chosen that Ox doesn't understand, but all the wolves do. It was very much You nicknamed my daughter after the Loch Ness monster?! IDK for me it's when you meet. If I meet someone as a child they're forever a child to me. There's a point when Ox starts dating as a young teen and Joe gets jealous. The literal child?? Why did the book start here? Or at least why did it spend so much time on their childhood? This confuses me.

Also, I can definitely tell a younger person wrote this, because when Joe is 17, he decides he has to leave for angst reasons and doesn't return until 3 years later. For those 3 years the split off members were living rough, hiding and hunting in the backcountry. And literally all I could think was "Joe does not even have a high school degree, he never finished high school, how is he supposed to be 'leading a pack' or doing angsty whatever when he probably doesn't even know how to calculate a hypotenuse?" When you're young you're like "yeah this feels great for the story" but when you get a bit older it's like "where are your parents, it is past your bedtime."

But there are so many things about the book I loved. Ox is disabled. A lot of his trauma comes from his deadbeat father calling him "slow" and "stupid" and telling him nobody could love him before he dips. I took a special joy in watching him become a cherished member of the Bennet family and grow into himself as a leader. The writing style captures Ox's unique voice and speech patterns so extremely well. There weren't a lot of female characters, but when there were, they were awesome. I really liked Jessie. The found family vibes (in between the overwhelming angst) were top notch. There were no weird heteronormative expectations on the MM couple (none of this top/bottom nonsense) and when it comes to fantasy relationships, it was an alpha/alpha relationship which is a subversion of a lot of omegaverse tropes (thank you tumblr, for allowing me to know this).

Overall, a very fun and nostalgic read that feels like a response to the Twilight era, but gayer. The angst and drama and fun sex scenes really took me back to high school, which is why I found myself up until 2am finishing this book, just like I did back then.

3.5/5 gay werewolf knockoff Twilight stars

 What an intriguing little book. A Marvellous Light is historical fantasy that scratched an itch I didn't even know I had. It's the opening book in a trilogy, and I won't lie, the only reason I was so excited for this book was I happened across @ming85's artwork of the second book in the series, A Restless Truth, and I really wanted to read about a lesbian transatlantic voyage murder mystery, so I hunkered down and got the first book out of the way. 

For as much as I read this book as a way to get to the lesbians, it was an enjoyable journey. The magic system Freya creates is fascinating, this concept called "cradling" revolving around intricate hand movements and the presence of a string, and while this novel familiarized you with the baser aspects of the magic system, including innate stores of power, BUT the author has already hinted that these established rules are clouded by misogyny, classism, and racism and are actively being challenged and these institutions are being challenged, but for the most part this book is dealing with the magical baseline.

The main characters and love interests are opposites. Edwin is bookish, cold, and waspish. He was born into the magical world but barely has any power of his own. Robin is mundane, no magic at all, a jock and newly elevated to the gentry with the death of his father. When an accident of paperwork gets him a job as the liaison from Parliament to the magical community, and he's plunged (or unbushelled) into the world of magic is where he meets Edwin, dives into the mystery of what happened to his predecessor, and stumbles across an ancient magical conspiracy along the way. It's fun, it's lighthearted, the mystery was engaging, and the book was surprisingly horny. I did enjoy how the author refused to play into tropes when it came to the sex scenes, and also there were a lot of them.

My only criticisms of this book are that I can't believe it only takes place over a week, like Robin and Edwin fall in gay love, break up, get back together in 7 days and you're trying to tell me lesbians are the u-haulers? Also Adelaide deserved more screen time, she was by far the most competent character, and I hope to see more of her and Kitty in future installments. 

4/5  READ THIS AND NOW I'M READY FOR THE LESBIANS STARS 

 Wow, what a read.

As a Houstonian who lived through both Katrina and Harvey, the devastation of hurricanes and flooding is not lost on me. I spent days ruminating over this book, and I still feel conflicted about it. While the investigation and reporting of events inside the hospital are some of the most profound words journalism has ever produced, the Part II “aftermath” section is riddled with the author’s biases, especially in a religious sense.

For those not in the know: this book follows the events at Memorial Baptist Hospital in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, in which 45 people died at the hospital and where one doctor and two nurses were charged with accusations of euthanasia. While the investigation of what went on at Memorial is poignant and powerful, Fink’s insistence on framing this entire debate on personal responsibility, while simultaneously letting a corporation she acknowledges as corrupt in passing off the hook is infuriating. Fink describes in detail and had access to Tenet’s (the parent corporation of the hospital) emails where they actively chose not to send aid to the doctors at their own hospital, and yet focuses all her vitriol on the nurses and doctors trapped there with no water, no electricity, limited resources, and dying patients. This is where I believe Fink’s personal religion colors this book to an unacceptable degree that makes this work unworthy of the Pulitzer Prize it won.

Sheri Fink’s disdain for certain topics shines through every snide remark disguised as journalism. She clearly does not agree philosophically with euthanasia. Fink is obviously religious, as she is incapable of removing her biases from her supposed “objective reporting” leads to targeted questions that clearly are intended to discredit the opinions she clearly disagrees with, “Could the societal embrace of suicide for terminally ill or disabled people lead to those groups feeling more worthless, devalued, and abandoned? Would it discount the meaning to be had from family reconnections, insights, forms of spiritual enrichment, and personal growth that may accompany death’s approach?” This quote comes from a passage where Fink is discussing and “airing the debate” of assisted suicide. She seems to have no problems with Jehovah’s Witnesses exorcising their rights to refuse treatment, but holds a palpable and sharp distaste for those who want the power to choose the time and place of their passing and be able to pass along painlessly. Even the veneer of her journalism can’t hide her pompous disdain for the idea. While I personally don’t know enough about medically assisted suicide to have an informed opinion, I have compassion for people who may be considering this route, and am curious enough about the debate to hear arguments and considerations from all sides. But Fink’s biases are so strong I found myself siding in opposition to her, just to spite her obvious attempts to sway my opinion. Towards the end of the book it gets worse. She describes a doctor who went to jail for facilitating a physician assisted suicide of a terminally ill patient in the 90s, and then switches to the perspective of an investigator who, upon reading a newspaper “what she read, made her cry.” She only shows the emotions of the people who’s perspective she agrees with, and somehow that perspective never points any blame at any corporation, government, or system that failed and always on individual people’s actions.

Fink also seems to completely disregard class consciousness until it serves her. She has no intellectual curiosity on how or why class affected Katrina outcomes, unless it’s to be condescending to her target: Dr. Anna Pou. This ends up reading as absurd, when a billion dollar hospital group was responsible for lack of preparation before, ignoring federal regulations and warnings about their storm-readiness and Fink reports all of this like it’s an afterthought. Ah yes, the entire system failed, the government failed to intervene and when they finally did their efforts were so disorganized they actively hindered rescue operations, but let’s not look any closer there, we definitely can’t investigate corporate malpractice, or even the possibility of personal responsibility for those in charge of the situation—no. We only care about personal responsibility of those not in charge. It’s this hyper-individualistic stance that confirmed for me that this book is religious in nature. She hyper-fixates on Dr. Pou’s wealth, while barely mentioning the two middle-class nurses charged alongside her unless it’s a brief mention of how they struggled financially after their respective arrests. Fink seems desperate to frame this novel as taking down the Big Guy, but instead of doing the more interesting and admittedly harder work of investigating the Big Guy, she chooses a single doctor as the figurehead of the worlds problems and dresses her up as the boogeyman while allowing the actual menacing entity responsible for this tragedy continue to exist unexamined.

Overall, I would say my feelings towards this book are… conflicted. I do think that documenting what went on is important, as is the discussion of euthanasia, medical standards and how they might shift in disasters, and the philosophical and ethical questions of practicing medicine in extenuating circumstances. I just firmly believe this book fails to achieve that to any meaningful degree, and instead reads as a religious manifesto on the sanctity of life, an attempt to take on the Man that was misaimed in a way that lets actual corrupt power fester unchecked.

★★★  DON’T READ THIS UNLESS YOU WANT TO BE ANGRY