woodslesbian's reviews
70 reviews

This book has been on my to-read list for SO long before I managed to find it second-hand by pure luck, and it really didn’t disappoint! I adored all the vivid descriptions, the warring political factions and intrigue, and the tender romance. Political marriages are always so interesting to me, and I loved seeing both characters slowly letting down their barriers for each other and working through their pasts. Xích Si and Rice Fish were both driven, interesting characters in their own rights, and I loved getting to see them interact and choose each other. I haven’t read any of de Bodard’s other books in this world, but I felt like I got my footing quickly and was along for the ride with the unique worldbuilding. 

My only real complaint is that I wish the pacing of this book had been a little slower and that it had been 100 or 200 pages longer, just to really have more development of that relationship and a slower pace while still maintaining the action and political struggles. This is definitely partially my own bias towards slow-burn romance; Xích Si and Rice Fish were drawn to each other pretty much right away, and I would’ve loved it if that trust was really developed more thoroughly and took more time to build up, but that’s a very minor thing. There was also a little bit of miscommunication and arguing where I wasn’t quite following what the characters were taking offense at, and so wasn’t as invested as I wanted to be. If this had been a little slower and a good chunk longer it definitely could’ve been a five-star, but I still really enjoyed it as-is! 

Jade Daniels you will always be famous!!!! It's no surprise that I enjoyed this one, considering how attached I am to her character and the overall writing style of this series, but I really felt like it was a satisfying conclusion to the whole thing. And, like any good sequel, it made me really want to go right back to the beginning for a full reread.

I was drawn right away into the mystery of what exactly was going on in Proofrock this time, as well as Stephen Graham Jones' always-fantastic descriptions of violence and gore. I just love his writing style and how deeply it draws the reader into the perspective of the characters. This is especially neat for a character like Jade who has such a unique perspective on the world and who we've seen go through so much--I was just so proud of her for the entire book and so invested in her and Letha especially. It worked for me to stick really close to Jade's point of view, even though I did really like getting a wider variety in Don't Fear the Reaper, too. I just can't overemphasize how invested I am in Jade and Proofrock, and ultimately I'm sad about saying goodbye for now, but satisfied with the conclusion.

I will say, the main reason this isn't a 5-star review is just that I felt like this installment wasn't quite as scary or thrilling as the first two, especially after Dark Mills South and all of the really strong tension and atmosphere in the last one. There were definitely moments where I was stressed and that same strong, visceral imagery, but it just didn't quite hit as hard for me as the first two books in the series. 

I LOVE YOU OBLIVIOUS, AMBITIOUS, MEAN BUTCHES!!!!!

 I was so worried I wasn't going to like this book because I was really looking forward to it (and therefore had a lot to lose) but ooooh it gave me everything I wanted!!! It really delivered on these compelling characters and especially their romance all throughout, developed through this compelling fantasy plot in a rich, fantastical world. I loved all the references to fairy tales, some I was familiar with and some I wasn't, and especially how they tied into the characters and the way they were viewed by the world at large. The magic system was also just spellbindingly beautiful, it felt simple enough to understand easily but the incorporation of fairy-type creatures really brought everything together so nicely and felt so vivid. Plus I'm always a sucker for a good love of science and the natural world, and with the way that magic was blended with naturalism in this book, I really got to be reminded of my own passion for being outside. 

As I said above, I loved Lorelai as a protagonist so so so much. It always makes me feel so incredibly seen to have a butch in literally anything, much less a butch protagonist with as much depth and interest as she does. I love that she's genuinely so curmudgeonly and bothered by things easily, and I also love the way in which her defensiveness is so justified because of people's prejudice about her. With her past and her fears and her goals, she was just so deeply compelling to me and I loved getting to explore this world through her eyes--especially when it's so fun to see her be completely oblivious about her own feelings for Sylvia.

Speaking of those two, their dynamic... oooh I am so picky about any kind of rivalry, especially when it turns romantic, because it both has to feel a little justified but also has to be fun to read and not just mean, and this was absolutely the perfect balance!!! Right from the beginning, every interaction between them was just so charged and delightful to read, and the progression from their bickering to genuine openness with each other was just perfect!!! Once I got into the second half of this book it was just giving me everything I dreamed of and more, like we got homoerotic wound tending, hair brushing, ooooh they have to sleep in the same tent, and so on and so forth. Sylvia just felt like such a good balance for Lorelai's dour attitude with all of her optimism and honesty! I would read a full series more of books about these two alone just because I loved getting to spend time with them, even though I was fully satisfied by both their arcs in this standalone. 

I did really like the mystery as well! I had a theory right from the beginning that turned out to be very, very wrong, but in general all the conclusions and twists felt so satisfying. Everything really came together perfectly in the way where I could look at past details and go OHHHH right!!! It also felt like the quest was genuinely tense and I never doubted the stakes of the world, especially with the (fantasy) antisemitism Lorelai faces. I tore through the last third because I was so caught up in the conclusion and what would happen to all of the characters. 

I really cannot emphasize enough how much this gave me what I have been missing in terms of a standalone, Sapphic fantasy romance, with the dynamic, the worldbuilding, and the level of plot. So glad I read this!!! 

I tend to really enjoy gothic fiction, and this is such a classic I had to check it out! I really enjoyed the writing style and the atmosphere of this book, and the slow buildup of tension. The settings in particular were incredibly vivid and really gave me everything I wanted for this isolated country manor. I also found the unnamed protagonist's relationship with her husband both fascinating and compelling, though not really in a romantic sense and more like something I'd keep in a petri dish. I wasn't necessarily surprised by the twists and turns, but I imagine that's in part because there's nearly 100 years of gothic fiction that's been shaped by Rebecca in one way or another that I'm already familiar with. There's also a lot of fascinating gendery things going on here, especially surrounding what is or isn't conventional femininity.

I can see how some people would find the main character annoying with how young and insecure she is, but I enjoyed getting to read from her perspective and felt like she really captures her age range well. I also loved that she's genuinely kind of weird, like the way she often drifts off into extremely detailed fantasies like all the time and is prone to catastrophizing. Rebecca herself is also one of the key figures in this book, despite dying before the novel, and her impact over every aspect of Manderley is just so palpable.

In terms of overall spookiness or outright horror, Rebecca has some fantastic, chilling imagery, though I would say it's on the more subtle side over all.  For me, though, the real horror was in

this relationship the narrator has not only trapped herself in but given everything for! Without being familiar with du Maurier as an author outside of this one book, it's hard for me to tell how intentional this is (though I'm leaning towards intentional), but the start of the book becomes absolutely chilling when in the context of Maxim's murder of Rebecca. Sure, if we trust what he says, Rebecca was a horrible, manipulative woman failing to live up to every single gendered expectation placed on her, but the fact is we only have Maxim's perspective on her. She can't speak for herself, and so the narrator completely trusts Maxim's viewpoint, and hardly even cares that he murdered a woman because she's so happy that he never loved his previous wife at all! It just makes her own position as Maxim's wife feel so precarious even though she certainly views herself as having a happy ending, even though she basically has no life outside of Maxim. I was also continuously so frustrated with how little Maxim communicated with her, and the fact that he then has the audacity to be surprised that she assumed that he... loved his first wife... who everyone says he loved. That drove me up the wall.

This was just such an interesting and atmospheric read! I think the ending was slightly less spooky than I hoped it would be, but I am also a horror fan in general while this book leans more firmly into the gothic romance category. Definitely worth a read! 

I wanted to like this because I love horrible things happening on spaceships, but Far From the Light of Heaven really left so little impression on me. Really "go girl give us nothing" as a book for me. 

To start with, I just didn't connect with the characters at all, for a few reasons: the writing felt flat and like it kept me at a distance from the story itself, we're just handed a couple of pieces of background for each of them without really getting any compelling demonstrations of how it shapes their motivations, and most of all we just kept getting new POVs throughout and skipping around too much for me to really care about anyone. Despite being the main character, Shell really felt like such a minor part of the story and I never really got into her head the way I would've loved. Another big problem for me is that this book isn't just unsatisfying as a space-survival story, because I didn't care about any of the characters enough to worry about them dying, but it also fails as a murder mystery in my opinion. The whole point of a mystery is trying to solve it as a reader myself, or at the very least get to have a moment of satisfaction when all these separate pieces come together in a cohesive conclusion, and that is NOT what we got here.

What do you MEAN the murderer is some completely random guy we've literally never met before this??? His reasons for being there are pretty interesting, but they're just dropped in through his point of view pretty late in the book, without exploring it fully or feeling like it really even mattered.

 

So much of the writing in this book just felt flat and distant and I just couldn't get into it. Another issue was the worldbuilding. There were a lot of cool elements thrown in, like the androids, aliens, the released wildlife all over the ship, the Lagos space station itself--but none of these were given enough detail or exploration. This is just my issue as a reader, but I DO want a bunch of paragraphs on how space plants work or what daily life looks like on the giant space station, and we got some technical detail but not in the way I wanted. Also, it really just felt like things kept happening to the characters without them driving the plot.

I know lots of people love this author's work, and he has a really interesting concept here, but so many different elements of this book fell flat for me. I was reading it to be finished with it and not because I wanted to be reading it. 

Nettle & Bone gave me everything I wanted from it as an unconventional little fantasy about those pushed to the sidelines, family, and plenty of magic! I loved Marra as a character, with all of her sense of justice, awkwardness, and absolute refusal to give up on protecting her family. Sister narratives always get me, and this one is no exception! But all of the side characters were equally striking, leaping right off of the page even in a relatively short book, and I found myself caring for all of them so much by the end. The magic and fairytale elements here were equally beautiful--they all felt original and unique, while also fitting so easily into the world Kingfisher had built. They felt like they could've easily been stories I had heard before in one way or another and were just delightful. I was so drawn into the story and the setting of this vibrant kingdom and all of its people! There was just a perfect balance of the magical with the real-world that kept me really invested, and lots of good little horror bits that created the perfect, eerie but fantastical tone. The romance also worked fine for me (and I am deeply picky about heterosexual romances), it wasn't anything I'll obsess over, but it was satisfying and well-developed. Again, I just feel like this book achieved everything it set out to do very well! 

Mixed feelings on this one overall tbh! To begin with, I read this book with the understanding that its goal is to be a dystopian examination of class and like... sickeningly sexy? In terms of its examination of consent/sex work/autonomy under the brutality of capitalism. I feel like those responding to this book as though it is a romance and that the central relationship is meant to be unilaterally romantic/compelling/hot are doing it a bit of a disservice, because that central relationship is a way of exploring those complex, gray themes. That's not to say that it necessarily succeeds at all of these goals--I'll get into that later--but that's what I think it's trying to do at least. Also, this is definitely very soft sci-fi, so there's not a ton of exploration on the worldbuilding itself.

To start with what I did like, Elijah as a protagonist just really worked for me. From the first chapter I was just rooting for him and sympathizing with his situation, and the various sections where he interacts with his family literally had me tearing up or sometimes even having to set the book down for a bit because I was too emotionally invested. I think this foundation for his character is super necessary for the direction the book takes and helped keep me emotionally invested all throughout, just because I needed to know what would happen to him. Loving Elijah also made me really really really hate Alex the whole way through, which... may or may not be the goal, but I was really hoping he would explode or get eaten by a shark randomly or something. On the whole, I found the style of this book very readable and engaging, and I felt like it did a good job of really digging into the scenes I wanted to see as a reader with the whole process of Elijah signing up to be a docile and everything, specifically during the beginning, though the pacing definitely picked up a lot towards the end. Even as the book becomes more law-focused during the second half, I still felt pretty engaged overall, and I read this one pretty quickly for a lengthier book.

Still, while I admire Docile's ambitious premise and attempts to tackle the evils of capitalism and questions of consent under an inherently unjust system, it doesn't necessarily dig as deep into these questions as I feel like it could have. As many others have pointed out, setting this book in a real, future-America and then largely ignoring race is a frankly bananas writing choice, especially when the Docile system is a form of legal slavery. Like??? Even speaking more broadly about class in general can't be done without taking race into consideration because of the way that people of color, especially black people, have been barred at every turn from the same work and wealth opportunities as white people, with tenant farming, being historically barred from union efforts, mass incarceration, and the list goes on. Trying to talk about class without a careful examination of race (and gender, disability, etc!) doesn't lead to a good, fleshed-out discussion of wealth stratification, which is a shame because in my opinion that's a key part of the questions this book is trying to raise. More generally, while I feel like Docile really set up all of these questions well in the beginning, I wasn't entirely satisfied with its exploration of them by the end and didn't feel like it got as deep into it as I wanted. Instead, I felt like the romance became more and more of a focus, and like halfway through the book I could feel it encroaching and was trying to just pretend maybe this wouldn't be the case. It felt a little like the central relationship, rather than being a tool through which to explore the themes and dynamics of this dystopian world, took central stage in and of itself.

I was telling a friend about this book as I read it because there were so many parts of it I found compelling, and when I told her I finished it, she was like "I hope [Alex] died" and I had to be like :) nope! Like. On one hand I sort of think his arc was necessary for the book, but I just found him so insufferable, unforgivable, and frankly so much less interesting than the other characters and parts of this world. I can't say if it would've been a better narrative conclusion or anything for him to die, but it's what I personally wanted. I also just never like the whole trope of "horrible guy realizes the error of his ways through the power of love, so I guess all those other people he hurt before this don't matter because he wasn't in love with them" if that makes sense. I know Alex apologizes to his friends but like... it's still crazy to me that Jess and Dutch weren't enough for Alex to change his ways, it specifically had to be a romance. Still, I did really enjoy the whole process Elijah had to go through with unlearning Alex's training, that on its own was powerful, but I wish it was without his open-ended conclusion with Alex which I could see coming a mile away.

Over all, there were a lot of parts of this book that I enjoyed, and I tore through it because I found it so interesting and compelling. But I don't feel like it lived up to its full potential in exploring the very dark themes it is trying to explore, and sometimes didn't feel quite serious enough for the topics it handles. In some aspects it did feel a little bit like fanfiction, and while that made it extremely readable, I would've liked it to deliver on the in-depth dystopian exploration that the tagline and cover promise. 

This book really resonated with the 12-year old in me who was very, VERY upset about not living in a portal fantasy, and just felt like such a love letter to the sort of child that I was. I loved how thoughtful this novella is, both in its worldbuilding and to all of its characters. It does a fantastic job of tackling the aftermath of all these little adventures, and each character's magical journey felt vibrant and fully fleshed-out, even when we hear just a tiny bit about them. I'll definitely be picking up the other novellas in this series! 

This Ravenous Fate was sort of a mixed bag for me--the romance really worked and I always love vampires, but because I really love vampires, and historical fiction, and especially queer vampire historical fiction, this book could've been such a good win for me and it was extra disappointing that this wasn't the case.

The strongest point of the book was absolutely the romance between Elise and Layla, and I found them both really compelling as characters! I was really rooting for these two young women even in their very different situations. Their dynamic of back-and-forth and slowly growing to trust each other again really worked for me. And of course since it's a vampire book, there HAD to be some homoerotic blood-drinking, and literally those were the most vivid, compelling scenes in the entire book for me and absolutely delivered on everything I dreamed of. I also really enjoyed the interesting conflicts between vampires and humans and the background of gang violence and the seedy underbelly of the city.

I think what didn't really work for me in this book were the character motivations, especially when it came to the antagonists. Like... it was so obvious the whole time who the villains were, and I couldn't quite understand how that kept going over the protagonists' heads.

In particular, I didn't really understand Valeria's role in the ending like at all??? She seemed so interesting, but it just didn't really feel like we actually explored her enough for me to understand why she was doing what she was doing or feel like that twist really made sense. Also I was consistently confused about Mr. Saint's deal, first he made it so clear he wanted to eradicate the reapers, so why would Elise ever believe him about wanting to make a cure??? He just wasn't very interesting and felt sort of one-note on the whole. The same is true for Sterling; it seemed like he went from being Elise's best friend and often viewing first-hand how cruel her father was to her, to suddenly completely siding with her father and refusing to listen to her without really any exploration of this shift at all. Also, it seemed so obvious to me that the reapers were being intentionally driven to violence in order to turn the city against them and eradicate them, right from the beginning. This twist being clear isn't a bad thing in and of itself, I just wish Layla and Elise actually spent more time speculating on this mystery, trying to put the pieces together, or even just talking about it instead of just jumping from one plot beat to the next so quickly.

This last note is moreso my personal preference than a real critique, but I do just wish this book felt more like historical fiction. There were some scenes where the vibrancy of the Harlem Renaissance really shone through, mostly in the description of the dance clubs, but I felt like the prose and setting didn't really deliver on genuinely feeling like the past enough, especially for such an interesting time period! I wish there was more inclusion of, like, historical speech and what daily life looked like in this time period to really draw me into the book's historical elements. Also, I would've loved more detail about Elise and Layla's relationship to their sexualities. Not that this needs to be the main focus of the book or anything, but even a few nods to how they view themselves or if the norms are different for humans vs reapers would've helped to clarify this--the closest we get is a joke about a very heterosexual "oh what good friends :)" response from Elise's mom (which I did find funny!) and I just would've loved more nuanced worldbuilding around this, just as the type of reader I am. This is especially true because Harlem at this time had what we'd consider today a thriving queer community with unique spaces and ways of being for the time, and I just feel like the girls' sexualities were really glossed over rather than explored.

That might sound like a lot of criticisms for a 3 star book, but I really did enjoy This Ravenous Fate overall! It just could have been a five star, so I put a lot of thought into figuring out why this wasn't the case. I do think this is a strong debut with some fantastic characters! Just that the plot side of things could've been much stronger. 

Huge shoutout to the friend who recommended this book so passionately that I finally picked it up after having it on my radar for years, because hooo boy it really gave me everything I could ever want and more!!! This is a slow, vivid epistolary fantasy focusing primarily on the relationship between our two protagonists and their experiences growing up together, with an emphasis on their growth, struggles for power, and romance rather than an intense plot or worldbuilding. 

This romance worked SO well for me. I loved the slow build of it, and while I often struggle with the idea of soulmates, Shefali and Shizuka's divine connection was not only completely believable but genuinely so beautiful. I am so obsessed with these two it's genuinely insane. In addition, I enjoyed the side-characters and really felt like they jumped right off of the page, be they allies of the girls or their enemies, I could always picture them well and was compelled by them! Especially their respective mothers--I loved that they're both so incredible and badass in different ways! The prose in this book is absolutely beautiful, too, with incredible descriptions of the natural world and the strange and magical happenings around these two women. I was just always drawn into the story, and I felt like the epistolary style worked well even in long chunks and never really took me out of the story. And the ending??? I had to go do something else instead of reading for a bit with like 20 pages to the end and it felt like I was being ripped away from a black hole, I was just so deeply invested in Shefali and Shizuka's story. I also loved both the court intrigue with the intense political back and forth and the bloody, brutal fight scenes!!! Both felt so deeply intense and just beautiful all the way throughout. This book just gave me everything I could possibly want with compelling, cutthroat protagonists, a slow, fleshed-out romance, and a shining fantasy world full of violence and strange magic. 

I can, like, intellectually understand people saying that the epistolary style took them out of the story, or that they wanted more concrete world building beyond just vibes, and the slow pace just didn't work for them--this book just had me hook, line, and sinker too much for me to worry about all that! I just had a great time personally, but I am inclined to love very descriptive, long, sapphic fantasy books.