March 2026 Reading Round Up (Part 1)
Mar. 15th, 2026 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
metallic_sweetBooks I Finished
Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World by Mark Waddell
Colin works for Dark Enterprises, a beyond shady it is literally Hell multinational corporation, and he’s a lowly pleb in the shittiest Human Resources department imaginable. Certain he’s about to be terminated, which means literal death here, he strikes a deal with a mysterious dark… thing he meets in the elevator one day and subsequently gets promoted and heralds the apocalypse. But Colin isn’t the antichrist: he’s just an ambitious corporate climber, just like anyone else, and what’s the point of getting promoted if the world ends before he can reap the benefits?
This is a very funny book that mixes a bunch of eldritch end times tropes with the mundanity of corporate bullshit like toxic bosses, endless ethics violations, and the fallacy of work-life balance. Colin seems like an everyday man, but it becomes clearer and clearer as New York City becomes ground zero for the devouring of the world that he’s just as sociopathic as everyone else: imagine The Devil Wears Prada but with blood sacrifice. Supported by a cast of distinctive, often queer, and equally morally bankrupt individuals, the only thing holding Colin’s oopsie apocalypse back is the slow first half of the book where people outside of the executive suite try to act like normal human beings.
I personally didn’t buy into Colin’s relationship with Eric; it’s at once too convenient and too complicated. Eric himself operates more as a plot device until late in the novel, and Colin had more chemistry for most of the book with the… thing he unleashed upon the world. I personally wished we had more of the executive suite because everyone is delightfully awful, and I want to see how they function to run Dark Enterprises, both as a Hell on Earth and as a shady and likely publicly traded company.
Rating: ★★★½☆
The Book That Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence
A well-written and deeply unhurried book that made me feel like I was doing my PhD research again and dragging myself through unvisited, poorly maintained archives full of repetitive mundanity interspersed with moments of discovery. Telling the entwined stories of Evar, who has lived his whole life in an astoundingly vast library, and Livira, whose mundane, difficult life in a harsh arid land called Dust, this is a love story to books, libraries, and the knowledge they contain, restrain, and explain.
The time travel aspects of this were really well done, and I really loved how all of the questions behind how Evar and Livira were meeting were revealed in due time. The gigantic, seemingly sentient library was a delight to explore with the two of them, and it reminded me of an epic dungeon crawler combined with Yddrasil and Tolkien’s First Age gigantic tree kingdoms. The supporting cast to Evar and Livira’s separate yet entwined lives are all distinct and thankfully not too many to keep track of, which is great with the density of detail in this novel.
Unfortunately, this book is held back from being great by its plodding, sometimes navel-gazing pace. Despite spurts of action, this reminded me of the long worldbuilding asides in Dune but without quite as much world building. I also found the elements of fantastic racism throughout the novel to be clunky and very tell not show; some of this can be excused by the main characters, particularly Livira, being quite young for most of the novel. The library is the most intriguing aspect of the novel, and I actively wanted to learn more about it and how it functions. The rest of the world was substantially less interesting to me, and, since Evar doesn’t exist outside of the library narratively, there were times in Livira’s narrative when I was just desperate to get through whatever was going on in the city and get back to the library.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
The Dragon and the Sun Lotus by Amélie Wen Zhao
Taking place a handful of years after the end of the last book, we rejoin Àn'yīng in the depths of the war between the immortal and mortal realms against the demon realms. She’s working closely and harmoniously with Hào’yáng, her “boy in the jade” and something of a morality pet, to try to turn the ties, but her heart still desires Yù’chén, the half mó, half human, who captured Àn'yīng’s heart in the previous book. Yù’chén, fascinatingly, is also a morality pet, teaching Àn'yīng about sacrifice and suffering at a level beyond her own understanding.
Look, I love melodrama, but this got to be too much, particularly in the “trapped in the demon realm” segment. Yù’chén is suffering in all sense and form, and Àn'yīng, who isn’t a very sympathetic person to begin with, just doesn’t get it until it’s literally shoved directly in her face as she witnesses one of Yù’chén’s frequent torture sessions. Àn'yīng’s strong sense of justice guided her well in the first book, which had substantially more characters to focus on. In this, her black and white way of engaging with the world became grating and, especially in the second half, self-defeating.
This could easily have been a M/F/M novel, but Àn'yīng apparently can’t fathom having both of her boys because she can’t get over her conviction that anything mó is inherently evil. Narratively, Zhao goes out of her way to point out that the mó are more complex, and Yù’chén becoming a POV character offers further insight into his motivations and proves his innate goodness. Once we got to the tacked on dragon realm sectionl, I started to wish that this was an Elizabeth Lim novel because, while her duologies can be protracted, her protagonists learn from their misjudgments. Unfortunately, Àn'yīng has a default setting of subborn black and white morality in the fashion of Katniss Everdeen, and it makes her hard to root for in this otherwise lushly detailed and imaginative romantasy.
Rating: ★½☆☆☆
Strange Buildings by Uketsu
Unlike Strange Houses, which focused on private domiciles, this mystery brings together twelve different buildings, each with their own tragedy associated with them. I particularly enjoyed trying to figure out how the religious cult and the odd dolls fit into the puzzle, and there’s a variety of types of people involved, which made going through the different case files and interviews to be rewarding. If readers are familiar with Japanese folklore and symbolism, they’ll get even more out of the story.
Once we got to Kurihara’s section, however, I was really disappointed by how repetitive the information rehashing got; it felt like Uketsu was trying to bulk out the page count rather than trusting the reader to remember what the case files contained. Unlike Strange Houses, where Kurihara is involved much earlier in the investigation, he feels like a convenient deus ex machina here, and I missed his eccentric personality playing off of the narrator. Overall, this is a solid installment to the series, just not as good as the first.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser
This is a rare instance where the publisher’s comparison for a book, this time to Bridgerton and Circe, is on point in a positive way. A retelling of Cinderella but from the “evil” stepmother’s POV, Hochhauser presents a mature and well-crafted fairy tale that turns the rags to riches story about a virtuous girl winning the prince against all odds on its head. Lady Tremaine, whose extremely long name is quickly shorted to Ethel, is a strong, morally grey protagonist who loves her daughters, including Elin, the Cinderella of this story, but is up against a world that favours and excuses the bad behaviour in men and punishes women for wanting anything for themselves. In other words, a world much like our own.
This book succeeds where many others in the genre of fairy tale retellings do not in using the microcosm of the tale to commentate on society. The little kingdom they live in is an isolationist state which allows for very little upward mobility, and anyone who steps outside of their social roles is at risk for ostracisation or worse. Ethel chafes against the status quo but also perpetuates the same abuses to keep her daughter in line, a domineering figure who is ultimately only trying to find the stability for her family that her own tragic marriages failed to provide. It’s only once Elin is picked by the prince and it’s quickly obvious all is not well that she becomes motivated to challenge her own prejudices and take her own agency.
I felt for Ethel in her struggle: like many women, she’s been primed to fulfill her role as mother and caretaker without any real support in either. Her relationship with her daughters are all strained but for different reasons that have to do with their personalities and beliefs, and I particularly appreciated that all three of the younger women got to have their own voices. The only thing that holds this back from being five solid stars for me is that there’s minor moments where the numerous side characters act in ways that don’t make sense for the sake of the plot, but thankfully this isn’t too often and usually has consequences. Overall, I would highly recommend this book so long as sensitive readers check trigger warnings.
Rating: ★★★★½
The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan
This is an excellent debut novel, weaving together three distinct timelines to tell the story of an ill-fated hunt of the entity that would be remembered as Beast of Gévaudan by “Professor” Sebastian Grave. Sebastian himself is possessed by a demon, Sarmodel, and he’s been alive since the height of the Roman Empire. His presence at the trial and thrice burning of Jeanne d'Arc ties him to the rise of the Beast in France, which lead to the events of the Red Winter in Gévaudan and, twenty years later, the growing fervor of the French Revolution. From a historical perspective, this book is severely reductive of French history and the evolution of Jeanne d’Arc as a symbol of French national identity, but it makes a combination of familiar (and deeply nationalistic, although I’m unsure how well Cameron understands this) French tales exciting for the general reader.
I really enjoyed how morally grey to properly evil characters are in this. Pretty much everyone who is a main to important side character is out for themselves, and those who happen to have a demon or angel attached to them are on the more evil sliding scale. The demons and angels themselves are extremely interesting and distinct, as are the other spiritual and supernatural creatures that populate the world. I felt rewarded for knowing the history and folklore that supports this book because Cameron treats his source material very well, and Sebastian is a self-absorbed smarmy bastard of a narrator whose tone is consistent and makes the different timelines feel natural.
In a lot of ways, this book hinges on the concept “even evil has standards”, especially with its grimdark rising action and how it handles the complexities of love. Antoine and Sebastian’s romance is fraught, built on a lot of blind passion and the arrogance of powerful men, and it’s excellent for it. The eve of the French Revolution timeline lags severely at points because the focus isn’t on that messy romance for the first half of the book, but once the timelines begin to show how they overlap, the writing and action becomes well-paced and closely interconnected. While this particular story is wrapped up pretty well, I think there’s ample material with Sebastian and his sometimes business partner, Livia, to have another story. If Cameron does do more, I will be lined up for it.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Cabaret in Flames by Hache Pueyo
This is a great horror novella that packs a punch both in worldbuilding and in character development despite its relatively short length. Ariadne is an underground doctor and tattooist who provides services for those in need, including human-eating guls that live alongside humans. Her somewhat unremarkable day to day is upended by the appearance of Quaint, a gul who has connections to her predecessor and former carer Erik, who Ariande believed disappeared several years before. This sets into motion events that force Ariadne to reckon with her horrific past and face her demons in the present.
Ariadne is a delight of a main character: she’s cautious and somewhat curmudgeonly, and she’s willing to do what it takes to control her fate and figure out what actually happened with Erik. Quaint is a mysterious and intriguing character, and it’s fascinating to figure out what makes him tick as a person as well as a gul. The two of them make for a fun investigative team, and I liked the different side characters they meet as the mystery grows more complex. Ariadne’s past is revealed through the progress of the plot, and, horrific as it is, I was really pleased to see her face it and, ultimately, take control over her trauma and feelings. How this was executed was, in my opinion, masterful.
I suspect a lot of the guls and their culture is heavily inspired by the Tokyo Ghoul series, especially the Gourmet, Restaurant, and Auction arcs which focus on upperclass ghouls who have particular tastes in their human flesh consumption. While this might fly over the heads of most readers, I know those series well and the parallels are extremely hard to ignore, particularly with Quaint being a pretty obvious blend of qualities in Tsukiyama Shuu and Kaneki Ken. Like Tokyo Ghoul, Pueyo uses the idea of a cannibalistic monster to interrogate what actually makes a monster, and the idea that humans can be mixed with guls/ghouls through science or by producing a hybrid child is another commonality between these works. Cabaret in Flames does stand on its own, especially in its social commentary on Brazil and the wider human condition, and it’s a great romp of a novella.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Her Hidden Fire by Cliodhna O'Sullivan
A solid debut and start to a trilogy, O'Sullivan leans into her knowledge of Ireland to craft a pseudo-medieval world full of magic and dragons and divided by severe classism. Éadha is in love with her childhood friend and the heir to the family she serves, Ionain. Discovering that she has a deep magical gift but he doesn't, she makes the choice to give substantial amounts of her power to Ionian secretly in hopes of preventing the family from becoming controlled by Huath, Ionian’s tyrannical and cruel uncle. At first the ruse is a success, and Éadha and Ionian both embark on the journey to Lambay where they’ll learn to use their power: Éadha as a Keeper and Ionian as a Channeller. The level of detail helps make the various island and coastal settings feel alive, and I particularly enjoyed that, while there were travel sections, they felt reasonable and added to the overall story.
More than anything else, this is about class, systemic oppression, and how power corrupts. O'Sullivan definitely found her horse and proceeds to use it for every part of it, including making glue. Éadha is essentially the usual extremely OP female main character in a romantasy, but she is absolutely her own worst enemy: her love for Ionian, who is a good person at heart, blinds her to his faults, and she herself is naive and narrow-minded, needing to be challenged and broken down until she sees others for who they are, including Guy, the enigmatic Keeper son of a very high ranking family. The execution of Éadha’s growth is uneven: she won’t listen to reason when other characters speak to her, but she will change her mind and views when she gets hurt or witnesses others suffering for her choices. This gets to be tedious, particularly in the middle of the novel where some of the conversations between Éadha and Guy become very explain-y.
Despite this, Éadha is a heroine that’s easy to root for: her heart is in the right place, and she does what she does out of the purity of love. I wish we could have gotten more with her interacting with dragons because I found those sparse sections to be so exciting, and it’s one of the only parts of the book where Éadha holds her own and isn’t thinking about a guy. It does look like they will be a much bigger part of the next book, and it bodes well that Ionian and Guy will both be getting POVs as they are interesting, especially with the finale of the first book leaving them in very interesting situations.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
A Stranger in the Citadel by Tobias Buckell
A story about the power of knowledge, literary, and reading in the fashion of Fahrenheit 451 and A Canticle for Leibowitz, Lilith is the youngest daughter of the Lord Musketer of the kingdom-city of Ninetha. Intrigued by the capture of a stranger at the fringes of the city walls, she intercedes for his life mostly out of curiosity as she has never met someone from beyond Ninetha. This puts her at odds with her mother figure and head of the guardians, Kira, and sets into motion the downfall of her own family as the stranger, Ishmael is revealed to be a librarian, which religion and law dictate must be killed.
The first part in Ninetha takes a while to get going as the reader has to follow Lilith through her days with many little interactions with her siblings that feel inconsequential. It isn't until a third of the way into the novel that the plot really picks up with Ishmael and Ninetha trying to find their way to safety from the violence they left behind: Lilith in Ninetha and Ishmael in his shadowed past. I enjoyed how well Buckell executed the issues of journeying on foot with limited supplies, and the continuous concern with starvation and dehydration grounded this in a way that often gets glossed over in both fantasy and sci-fi. I also liked the dynamic between Lilith and Ishmael because they're drawn to each other but also hold completely different world views, challenging each other just as much as they help each other.
This story is held back by incessant dialogue, which strays into severe melodrama and over-explanation of major plot points. This is particularly an issue with Kira, who talks so much for someone who is seemingly designed for immediate action. Aside from the main three, very few other characters get development, and it was hard to feel anything for them. The highlight of this story is the world building: I loved the mystery of the cornucopia and the archangel, and there's some real intrigue with the remnants of civilisation that are discovered as they traverse through and beyond the so-called Rim of the World. I liked the mystery of what exactly happened to humanity and how did strange, highly advanced technology survive, but a lot remains a mystery, which left me with mixed feelings at the end.
Rating: ★★½☆☆
Books I Didn’t Finish
The Devils by Joe Abercrombie
This was a creative, fast-paced, fun read that I just couldn’t get into once the ragtag group set off on their journey. It’s a shame because the set up with werewolves, demons, necromancers, etc. has so much promise, but I found myself unable to get attached to anyone, partly because the POVs jump around so quickly and between so many. I came back to this book for a second time and didn’t get much further than before, so it’s time to let it go.
Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World by Mark Waddell
Colin works for Dark Enterprises, a beyond shady it is literally Hell multinational corporation, and he’s a lowly pleb in the shittiest Human Resources department imaginable. Certain he’s about to be terminated, which means literal death here, he strikes a deal with a mysterious dark… thing he meets in the elevator one day and subsequently gets promoted and heralds the apocalypse. But Colin isn’t the antichrist: he’s just an ambitious corporate climber, just like anyone else, and what’s the point of getting promoted if the world ends before he can reap the benefits?
This is a very funny book that mixes a bunch of eldritch end times tropes with the mundanity of corporate bullshit like toxic bosses, endless ethics violations, and the fallacy of work-life balance. Colin seems like an everyday man, but it becomes clearer and clearer as New York City becomes ground zero for the devouring of the world that he’s just as sociopathic as everyone else: imagine The Devil Wears Prada but with blood sacrifice. Supported by a cast of distinctive, often queer, and equally morally bankrupt individuals, the only thing holding Colin’s oopsie apocalypse back is the slow first half of the book where people outside of the executive suite try to act like normal human beings.
I personally didn’t buy into Colin’s relationship with Eric; it’s at once too convenient and too complicated. Eric himself operates more as a plot device until late in the novel, and Colin had more chemistry for most of the book with the… thing he unleashed upon the world. I personally wished we had more of the executive suite because everyone is delightfully awful, and I want to see how they function to run Dark Enterprises, both as a Hell on Earth and as a shady and likely publicly traded company.
Rating: ★★★½☆
The Book That Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence
First book in The Library Trilogy
A well-written and deeply unhurried book that made me feel like I was doing my PhD research again and dragging myself through unvisited, poorly maintained archives full of repetitive mundanity interspersed with moments of discovery. Telling the entwined stories of Evar, who has lived his whole life in an astoundingly vast library, and Livira, whose mundane, difficult life in a harsh arid land called Dust, this is a love story to books, libraries, and the knowledge they contain, restrain, and explain.
The time travel aspects of this were really well done, and I really loved how all of the questions behind how Evar and Livira were meeting were revealed in due time. The gigantic, seemingly sentient library was a delight to explore with the two of them, and it reminded me of an epic dungeon crawler combined with Yddrasil and Tolkien’s First Age gigantic tree kingdoms. The supporting cast to Evar and Livira’s separate yet entwined lives are all distinct and thankfully not too many to keep track of, which is great with the density of detail in this novel.
Unfortunately, this book is held back from being great by its plodding, sometimes navel-gazing pace. Despite spurts of action, this reminded me of the long worldbuilding asides in Dune but without quite as much world building. I also found the elements of fantastic racism throughout the novel to be clunky and very tell not show; some of this can be excused by the main characters, particularly Livira, being quite young for most of the novel. The library is the most intriguing aspect of the novel, and I actively wanted to learn more about it and how it functions. The rest of the world was substantially less interesting to me, and, since Evar doesn’t exist outside of the library narratively, there were times in Livira’s narrative when I was just desperate to get through whatever was going on in the city and get back to the library.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
The Dragon and the Sun Lotus by Amélie Wen Zhao
Second book in The Three Realms duology
Taking place a handful of years after the end of the last book, we rejoin Àn'yīng in the depths of the war between the immortal and mortal realms against the demon realms. She’s working closely and harmoniously with Hào’yáng, her “boy in the jade” and something of a morality pet, to try to turn the ties, but her heart still desires Yù’chén, the half mó, half human, who captured Àn'yīng’s heart in the previous book. Yù’chén, fascinatingly, is also a morality pet, teaching Àn'yīng about sacrifice and suffering at a level beyond her own understanding.
Look, I love melodrama, but this got to be too much, particularly in the “trapped in the demon realm” segment. Yù’chén is suffering in all sense and form, and Àn'yīng, who isn’t a very sympathetic person to begin with, just doesn’t get it until it’s literally shoved directly in her face as she witnesses one of Yù’chén’s frequent torture sessions. Àn'yīng’s strong sense of justice guided her well in the first book, which had substantially more characters to focus on. In this, her black and white way of engaging with the world became grating and, especially in the second half, self-defeating.
This could easily have been a M/F/M novel, but Àn'yīng apparently can’t fathom having both of her boys because she can’t get over her conviction that anything mó is inherently evil. Narratively, Zhao goes out of her way to point out that the mó are more complex, and Yù’chén becoming a POV character offers further insight into his motivations and proves his innate goodness. Once we got to the tacked on dragon realm sectionl, I started to wish that this was an Elizabeth Lim novel because, while her duologies can be protracted, her protagonists learn from their misjudgments. Unfortunately, Àn'yīng has a default setting of subborn black and white morality in the fashion of Katniss Everdeen, and it makes her hard to root for in this otherwise lushly detailed and imaginative romantasy.
Rating: ★½☆☆☆
Strange Buildings by Uketsu
Second in a series
I had gotten the impression with Strange Houses that there would be a sequel, and I was pleasantly surprised that this is more of a follow up to the previous book with the narrator investigating odd homes and buildings brought to him by people who read his in-universe book on the events of the previous mystery. The narrator is more of the Watson to his friend Kurihara’s Sherlock, and this encourages the reader to try to make their own guesses and conclusions as the narrator interviews different people and collects various articles and ephemera throughout his investigation. It’s a set up that’s familiar to many readers and effectively executed. Unlike Strange Houses, which focused on private domiciles, this mystery brings together twelve different buildings, each with their own tragedy associated with them. I particularly enjoyed trying to figure out how the religious cult and the odd dolls fit into the puzzle, and there’s a variety of types of people involved, which made going through the different case files and interviews to be rewarding. If readers are familiar with Japanese folklore and symbolism, they’ll get even more out of the story.
Once we got to Kurihara’s section, however, I was really disappointed by how repetitive the information rehashing got; it felt like Uketsu was trying to bulk out the page count rather than trusting the reader to remember what the case files contained. Unlike Strange Houses, where Kurihara is involved much earlier in the investigation, he feels like a convenient deus ex machina here, and I missed his eccentric personality playing off of the narrator. Overall, this is a solid installment to the series, just not as good as the first.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser
This is a rare instance where the publisher’s comparison for a book, this time to Bridgerton and Circe, is on point in a positive way. A retelling of Cinderella but from the “evil” stepmother’s POV, Hochhauser presents a mature and well-crafted fairy tale that turns the rags to riches story about a virtuous girl winning the prince against all odds on its head. Lady Tremaine, whose extremely long name is quickly shorted to Ethel, is a strong, morally grey protagonist who loves her daughters, including Elin, the Cinderella of this story, but is up against a world that favours and excuses the bad behaviour in men and punishes women for wanting anything for themselves. In other words, a world much like our own.
This book succeeds where many others in the genre of fairy tale retellings do not in using the microcosm of the tale to commentate on society. The little kingdom they live in is an isolationist state which allows for very little upward mobility, and anyone who steps outside of their social roles is at risk for ostracisation or worse. Ethel chafes against the status quo but also perpetuates the same abuses to keep her daughter in line, a domineering figure who is ultimately only trying to find the stability for her family that her own tragic marriages failed to provide. It’s only once Elin is picked by the prince and it’s quickly obvious all is not well that she becomes motivated to challenge her own prejudices and take her own agency.
I felt for Ethel in her struggle: like many women, she’s been primed to fulfill her role as mother and caretaker without any real support in either. Her relationship with her daughters are all strained but for different reasons that have to do with their personalities and beliefs, and I particularly appreciated that all three of the younger women got to have their own voices. The only thing that holds this back from being five solid stars for me is that there’s minor moments where the numerous side characters act in ways that don’t make sense for the sake of the plot, but thankfully this isn’t too often and usually has consequences. Overall, I would highly recommend this book so long as sensitive readers check trigger warnings.
Rating: ★★★★½
The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan
This is an excellent debut novel, weaving together three distinct timelines to tell the story of an ill-fated hunt of the entity that would be remembered as Beast of Gévaudan by “Professor” Sebastian Grave. Sebastian himself is possessed by a demon, Sarmodel, and he’s been alive since the height of the Roman Empire. His presence at the trial and thrice burning of Jeanne d'Arc ties him to the rise of the Beast in France, which lead to the events of the Red Winter in Gévaudan and, twenty years later, the growing fervor of the French Revolution. From a historical perspective, this book is severely reductive of French history and the evolution of Jeanne d’Arc as a symbol of French national identity, but it makes a combination of familiar (and deeply nationalistic, although I’m unsure how well Cameron understands this) French tales exciting for the general reader.
I really enjoyed how morally grey to properly evil characters are in this. Pretty much everyone who is a main to important side character is out for themselves, and those who happen to have a demon or angel attached to them are on the more evil sliding scale. The demons and angels themselves are extremely interesting and distinct, as are the other spiritual and supernatural creatures that populate the world. I felt rewarded for knowing the history and folklore that supports this book because Cameron treats his source material very well, and Sebastian is a self-absorbed smarmy bastard of a narrator whose tone is consistent and makes the different timelines feel natural.
In a lot of ways, this book hinges on the concept “even evil has standards”, especially with its grimdark rising action and how it handles the complexities of love. Antoine and Sebastian’s romance is fraught, built on a lot of blind passion and the arrogance of powerful men, and it’s excellent for it. The eve of the French Revolution timeline lags severely at points because the focus isn’t on that messy romance for the first half of the book, but once the timelines begin to show how they overlap, the writing and action becomes well-paced and closely interconnected. While this particular story is wrapped up pretty well, I think there’s ample material with Sebastian and his sometimes business partner, Livia, to have another story. If Cameron does do more, I will be lined up for it.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Cabaret in Flames by Hache Pueyo
This is a great horror novella that packs a punch both in worldbuilding and in character development despite its relatively short length. Ariadne is an underground doctor and tattooist who provides services for those in need, including human-eating guls that live alongside humans. Her somewhat unremarkable day to day is upended by the appearance of Quaint, a gul who has connections to her predecessor and former carer Erik, who Ariande believed disappeared several years before. This sets into motion events that force Ariadne to reckon with her horrific past and face her demons in the present.
Ariadne is a delight of a main character: she’s cautious and somewhat curmudgeonly, and she’s willing to do what it takes to control her fate and figure out what actually happened with Erik. Quaint is a mysterious and intriguing character, and it’s fascinating to figure out what makes him tick as a person as well as a gul. The two of them make for a fun investigative team, and I liked the different side characters they meet as the mystery grows more complex. Ariadne’s past is revealed through the progress of the plot, and, horrific as it is, I was really pleased to see her face it and, ultimately, take control over her trauma and feelings. How this was executed was, in my opinion, masterful.
I suspect a lot of the guls and their culture is heavily inspired by the Tokyo Ghoul series, especially the Gourmet, Restaurant, and Auction arcs which focus on upperclass ghouls who have particular tastes in their human flesh consumption. While this might fly over the heads of most readers, I know those series well and the parallels are extremely hard to ignore, particularly with Quaint being a pretty obvious blend of qualities in Tsukiyama Shuu and Kaneki Ken. Like Tokyo Ghoul, Pueyo uses the idea of a cannibalistic monster to interrogate what actually makes a monster, and the idea that humans can be mixed with guls/ghouls through science or by producing a hybrid child is another commonality between these works. Cabaret in Flames does stand on its own, especially in its social commentary on Brazil and the wider human condition, and it’s a great romp of a novella.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Her Hidden Fire by Cliodhna O'Sullivan
First book in a trilogy
A solid debut and start to a trilogy, O'Sullivan leans into her knowledge of Ireland to craft a pseudo-medieval world full of magic and dragons and divided by severe classism. Éadha is in love with her childhood friend and the heir to the family she serves, Ionain. Discovering that she has a deep magical gift but he doesn't, she makes the choice to give substantial amounts of her power to Ionian secretly in hopes of preventing the family from becoming controlled by Huath, Ionian’s tyrannical and cruel uncle. At first the ruse is a success, and Éadha and Ionian both embark on the journey to Lambay where they’ll learn to use their power: Éadha as a Keeper and Ionian as a Channeller. The level of detail helps make the various island and coastal settings feel alive, and I particularly enjoyed that, while there were travel sections, they felt reasonable and added to the overall story.
More than anything else, this is about class, systemic oppression, and how power corrupts. O'Sullivan definitely found her horse and proceeds to use it for every part of it, including making glue. Éadha is essentially the usual extremely OP female main character in a romantasy, but she is absolutely her own worst enemy: her love for Ionian, who is a good person at heart, blinds her to his faults, and she herself is naive and narrow-minded, needing to be challenged and broken down until she sees others for who they are, including Guy, the enigmatic Keeper son of a very high ranking family. The execution of Éadha’s growth is uneven: she won’t listen to reason when other characters speak to her, but she will change her mind and views when she gets hurt or witnesses others suffering for her choices. This gets to be tedious, particularly in the middle of the novel where some of the conversations between Éadha and Guy become very explain-y.
Despite this, Éadha is a heroine that’s easy to root for: her heart is in the right place, and she does what she does out of the purity of love. I wish we could have gotten more with her interacting with dragons because I found those sparse sections to be so exciting, and it’s one of the only parts of the book where Éadha holds her own and isn’t thinking about a guy. It does look like they will be a much bigger part of the next book, and it bodes well that Ionian and Guy will both be getting POVs as they are interesting, especially with the finale of the first book leaving them in very interesting situations.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
A Stranger in the Citadel by Tobias Buckell
A story about the power of knowledge, literary, and reading in the fashion of Fahrenheit 451 and A Canticle for Leibowitz, Lilith is the youngest daughter of the Lord Musketer of the kingdom-city of Ninetha. Intrigued by the capture of a stranger at the fringes of the city walls, she intercedes for his life mostly out of curiosity as she has never met someone from beyond Ninetha. This puts her at odds with her mother figure and head of the guardians, Kira, and sets into motion the downfall of her own family as the stranger, Ishmael is revealed to be a librarian, which religion and law dictate must be killed.
The first part in Ninetha takes a while to get going as the reader has to follow Lilith through her days with many little interactions with her siblings that feel inconsequential. It isn't until a third of the way into the novel that the plot really picks up with Ishmael and Ninetha trying to find their way to safety from the violence they left behind: Lilith in Ninetha and Ishmael in his shadowed past. I enjoyed how well Buckell executed the issues of journeying on foot with limited supplies, and the continuous concern with starvation and dehydration grounded this in a way that often gets glossed over in both fantasy and sci-fi. I also liked the dynamic between Lilith and Ishmael because they're drawn to each other but also hold completely different world views, challenging each other just as much as they help each other.
This story is held back by incessant dialogue, which strays into severe melodrama and over-explanation of major plot points. This is particularly an issue with Kira, who talks so much for someone who is seemingly designed for immediate action. Aside from the main three, very few other characters get development, and it was hard to feel anything for them. The highlight of this story is the world building: I loved the mystery of the cornucopia and the archangel, and there's some real intrigue with the remnants of civilisation that are discovered as they traverse through and beyond the so-called Rim of the World. I liked the mystery of what exactly happened to humanity and how did strange, highly advanced technology survive, but a lot remains a mystery, which left me with mixed feelings at the end.
Rating: ★★½☆☆
Books I Didn’t Finish
The Devils by Joe Abercrombie
This was a creative, fast-paced, fun read that I just couldn’t get into once the ragtag group set off on their journey. It’s a shame because the set up with werewolves, demons, necromancers, etc. has so much promise, but I found myself unable to get attached to anyone, partly because the POVs jump around so quickly and between so many. I came back to this book for a second time and didn’t get much further than before, so it’s time to let it go.
