March 2026 Reading Round Up (Part 2)
Mar. 31st, 2026 08:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
metallic_sweetBooks I Finished
The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas
This is a good novel by Cañas and a solid debut for her back in 2022. A gothic house story set directly following the Mexican War of Independence, Beatriz is newly wedded to Rodolpho and has moved to his family estate, Hacienda San Isidro. The house has fallen into disrepair during the war, and the staff is reduced, but Beatriz is happy to take on the renovations and make the place her own. Very quickly, the house is revealed to be sinister, and no one around Beatriz, including standoffish Rodolpho’s sister, Juana, and the mysterious Padre Andrés, is exactly who they seem.
I really liked the relationship between Beatriz and Andrés. The circumstances that draw them together to try to solve the haunting of San Isidro make sense: Beatriz wants to be safe and in control in her new home, and Andrés has a family connection to the house and land. The tension between them is doubtlessly romantic, but they are both more focused on their own goals, standing in society, and interpersonal relationships. In a way, this is a story of both of them learning to claim their own identities and agency, even if it goes against the grain.
Cañas’s writing is tight although somewhat simplistic, which supports fast-paced action but leaves some of the environment and side characters behind. The interior of the house is hard to imagine since it’s at once very large yet also very small with most action taking place in a small handful of rooms. Beatriz starts the novel working on the gardens, but this is quickly dropped as the spectral and violent happenings pick up in the house. I didn’t find this book to be particularly scary, rather a good romp with likeable main characters and a satisfying ending.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
The Legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox by Katrina Kwan
A spirited East Asian folklore inspired tale in the vein of Kwan’s previous work, The Last Dragon of the East, Yue is a nine-tailed fox spirit who is captured by the famed demon hunter, Sonam. Through a series of unfortunate events, they along with Sonam’s two companions become trapped in Hell where they must face trials set by mercurial gods and, ultimately, their own pasts and faults. This is a focused and not overly complex adventure, action-packed and full of heart and imagination.
At the same time, the pace can be too fast-paced with characters zipping from trial to trial, and I never felt like the characters are truly in danger except when the actual major villain is involved. Most twists and turns can be seen from a mile away, and there’s elements of dungeon crawling through Hell, which only works if tension exists. The POVs switching between Yue and Sonam are pretty well-balanced until that major villain fully comes into play, and then we’re locked into Sonam’s POV to build tension. I felt like the choice weakened Yue’s strong character to make her a more appealing romantic partner.
Throughout the novel there are intermittent chapters that tell a modified version of the Chang’e and Hon Yi folktale and integrates it into the story. I found these short bits to be what I looked forward to the most, and I ended up wishing we could spend more time and detail on them as the information shared there really added to the main story. Overall, this is a nice romp of a book that would be satisfying to younger YA readers or as a vacation read.
Rating: ★★½☆☆
Weavingshaw by Heba Al-Wasity
This is Al-Wasity’s debut, a sometimes too ambitious gothic romantasy that speaks to Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Reylo. Leena, desperate to obtain an expensive cure for her sick brother, goes to the Saint of Silence, St. Silas, to sell her great secret: she can see and, to a certain extent, communicate with the restless dead. A genre-aware novel that excels in its characters and certain environmental details, it does a great job with the ghosts and Leena being realistically afraid and drawn to their plights. It does rather less well with the awkward political asides that introduce slews of additional characters, end up driving the plot, and in which Leena is almost always off-screen.
For me, the romantic tension between Leena and St. Silas both came out of nowhere and was utterly foreseeable. They function as enemies working together for mutual gain until suddenly they don’t: Leena’s resentment of St. Silas seems to conveniently evaporate and his reserve is peeled back less like layers on an onion and more like it was put in a food processor and rapidly pulsed. I hate to say it, but I felt like St. Silas was gradually woobified, and, predictably, once that began happening, we had to be introduced to a true predator to Leena’s safety. This ends up straddling grimdark and gothic in its details but solidly reads as a toxic romance overall.
I did like the atmosphere of Weavingshaw, and, if I read the next book in the series, I am eager to see Leena return there. I am also interested in the mysteries surrounding Leena’s family, broken and separated first by civil war and then the many disadvantages of being refugees. I liked that relationships between Leena and her surviving family members are fraught and rooted in how trauma and systematic oppression can warp people even when they have the best intentions. Based upon the ending, the next book should deal more deeply with those family issues and possibly offer Leena some character growth not driven by a man. Overall, there’s a lot of meat on the bones of this one, but it could have been longer in the oven.
Rating: ★★½☆☆
Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas
Cañas offers a unique take on the vampire genre, interweaving the Mexican American War and class tension between ranchers and vaqueros. The main characters, Nena and Néstor are childhood friends who were on the cusp of youthful love when they’re attacked by a mysterious creature, giving Nena a seemingly fatal injury and forcing Néstor to flee. When they reunite years later with war on their doorstep, Nena has become a healer but lives with the threat of marriage to a wealthy business partner of her family looming over her head; meanwhile, Néstor has come into his own as a successful and respected vaquero, but he remains haunted by the events of the night back when they were thirteen. Obviously, misunderstandings and many, occasionally convoluted action sequences ensue.
Out of Cañas’s novels, this one has the oddest pacing, especially at the beginning after the opening chapter and midway as Nena and Néstor travel together. While both of these sections are full of tension-building content as Nena and Néstor’s relationship continually shifts, both characters suffer from their inability to say anything straight to each other except when under duress from outside forces. It’s not as frustrating as it could be as either Americans or vampires inevitably appear and get them to move along with their emotional constipation, and I did find the finale to be a good pay off with both characters becoming extremely self-aware.
I really liked how the vampire tropes were played with in this, and I loved the twist in the second half as to why the vampire attacks had so noticeably increased. The twist also gave both Néstor and Nena an opportunity to shine, since they both come with their own knowledge of how to deal with the vampires, and the creatures give them a common enemy even when the two of them are being excessively petty. Cañas also did a great job with the setting in this, using the difficult terrain and hot, intense climate to make the story tangible and immersive. Overall, I enjoyed this, and I’m glad I returned to it after I shelved it a few chapters in a couple years ago.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Cinder House by Freya Marske
This is a truly lovely novella that takes a fun spin with the Cinderella tale. Ella, killed by her stepmother, Patrice, at sixteen along with her father, has become a ghost bound to the house she died in. Only Patrice and her daughters, Greta and Danica, who live in the house, and a fairy in the nearby city named Quaint can see her. For the next six years, Ella learns how to be a ghost and, more importantly, how to push the boundaries of her haunting to gradually leave the house and explore the world around her until she’s forced to return home at the stroke of midnight.
I think what made this retelling really work for me was how Prince Jule’s ball is three evenings long, and each night offers Ella more opportunities to explore his world and get to know him as well as building mystery around the foreign princess Nadia. As this is a novella, every mystery progresses quickly and reveals are made night to night, but it’s well-paced and new twists lead directly to new conclusions. I really enjoyed how Ella grew so much in this section of the novel, like the magic around her helps her in taking control of her own destiny rather than the other way around.
The machinations of Patrice and Greta are refreshingly realistic: Patrice, like many women who have gone through hardship, ultimately seeks security, and Greta serves as an example of what happens to a child who is spoiled rotten. Details are well-spent with the limited space of the novella, and I personally enjoyed the ending, even though it’s a bit self-indulgent. Why not? It’s a fairy tale after all.
Rating: ★★★★★
The Tropic of Serpents by Marie Brennan
Taking place about three years after the first book, we join Isabella as she prepares to go on a new expedition to study dragons, this time to Eriga, a pseudo-African country that is in a precarious political position. Despite itself and even its own protagonist’s desires, this entry in the series has much more to say politically and socially than on the topic of dragons themselves. Some of the commentary and thinly veiled parallels to real world history hits the mark, while others range from eye-rolling to deeply cringe-worthy.
This book shines in its environment details along with the delightful occasional drawing. I absolutely loved the lush descriptions of the various locales and animals encountered in Eriga, which is also why I wished there was more time spent on the dragons. When Isabella gets to actually talk about dragons and certain flora and fauna, her characteristic enthusiasm and raw wonder is infectious and feels very real. She has also grown a great deal from the first book, and the trials and tribulations in this make her continue to grow as a person, as a naturalist, and as a citizen of the world. Her character journey is satisfying, rewarding, and, when focused on the natural world, extremely fun.
Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy how some of the overarching themes of colonialism and racism were handled. The design of some of the Eriga characters, especially those in authority positions, raised some questions and more than a few eyebrows for me regarding the writer’s own understanding of the cultures being meshed together. There were a lot of important plot points that get wrapped up in the sense of the event itself but have notably wider-reaching consequences. Most of these are in the vein of political turmoil and unrest, which stretches beyond the current boundaries of the first two novels. I rated this three stars because there are a number of threads started here that I am curious to see progress in the next book, but I’m not sure if I’m up for more hamfisted pseudo-Victorian nonsense.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
This book is hard to classify: it’s social commentary more than anything else with elements of horror, fantasy, and sci-fi to give structure to the narrative, which is all told through the extremely unreliable lens of the main character, Natsuki. The overall tone is bizarrely light-hearted as Natsuki goes through her life with an increasing amount of detachment and delusion, often utterly alone and only occasionally surrounded by her few supporters: her cousin, Yuu, with whom she has an incestuous relationship with starting in their preteens, and her husband, Tomoya, who she met through a matchmaking website and married based upon his desire for a sexless marriage. Murata’s narrative construction is masterful, dividing the majority of entwined events into two parts: the first in Natsuki’s preteen years, the second during the third year of her marriage.
Natsuki’s upbringing is abusive, particularly from her mother who pits her two daughters against each other and verbally and physically abuses Natsuki. At cram school, Natsuki is sexually abused by a well-liked teacher, and her attempts to seek help are viciously turned back on her by family and friends. It’s distressingly easy to see why Natsuki would spend the majority of her time daydreaming she’s a magician, who will one day be saved by her magical powers or aliens, and how she becomes attached to Yuu, her gentle cousin who is the only person in her life who listens to her and who she only sees once a year when their families visit their grandparents in the mountain village of Akishina. Family, friends, and society routinely fail to meet Natsuki’s needs and push her to try any avenue to defend herself, trying to fulfil the most important promise Yuu and her make: survive at all costs.
None of this happens in isolation: by the time Natsuki and Tomoya are married, they know they’re just cogs in the machine, or, as they call it, the Factory. After the loss of both of their jobs, they go to Akishina where Yuu is temporarily living after also losing his job. The events that pan out from there become progressively more wild and eventually pass beyond the pale, which both enforces and loses some of the message about the tragedy and impossibility of perfect conformity that Murata goes to all lengths to explain. In a weird way, Natsuki could never be anything else but an alien in a world where women are to blame for the mistakes and cruelties of others, and the real question is who is truly responsible for the consequences?
Rating: ★★★★☆
Innamorata by Ava Reid
This is Reid’s adult novel debut, a dark gothic fantasy that is essentially a reskinned Gormenghast world populated with morally grey to bankrupt characters. Our main POV character is Agnes, the silent cousin of the current head of the House of Teeth, Marioza. She travels with her cousin to be her companion in her betrothal to Prince Liuprand and to fulfil the mission her grandmother gave her to recover and restore their House’s ancestral magic from the books in the palace library. Once at Castle Peake, Agnes begins swiftly to learn that even the best laid plans go awry: Marioza and Agnes have always been unnaturally close, and Liuprand’s entrance in their carefully balanced lives is the least of their worries.
For all the other reviewers I’ve seen complaining about the lack of content warnings, I’m complaining about how this book does a disservice to Reid’s own strengths. Reid is particularly good at developing complex, morally grey characters and lushly atmospheric settings, which is why I’ve read a number of her books. Unfortunately, Innamorata feels like a repetitively remixed ASOIAF Red Wedding combined with the insular and self-indulgent foundation (and trappings, and character archetypes, etc, etc) of Gormenghast. Subsequently, this book tips beyond darkly gothic into grimdark, which wouldn’t bother me if it was appropriately marketed as such. The inherent grimdark marker of on-screen major taboos is very much present, and the horror waffles from gross to eye-rolling to even cringe-worthy rather than evoking the macabre.
While I did like Agnes as a main character, it’s extremely hard to like literally anything else. I found the most tension-ridden scene to be a birthing sequence in the middle of the book because it is the most focused, making great use of the most interesting characters and finally revealing some of their true functions. The rest of the story is bogged down with too many characters of little consequence and Reid’s verbosity, which is a strength of her other novels but confusing to excruciating here. In the past I’ve forgiven and even praised Reid for how some of her books read like self-indulgent fic of specific literary and pop culture touchstones, but I can’t forgive this messily structured and ultimately boring book.
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
Wolf-Worm by T. Kingfisher
This is an excellent outing by Kingfisher that plays to her strengths: a dynamic, well-crafted main narrator, lush environmental details, and a fairly straightforward plot take allows the linear plot to progress without impediment. The year is 1899 and Sonia Wilson, a scientific illustrator, has just arrived in Chatham, North Carolina, to start her new job for Dr. Halder, who is working on a manuscript about parasitic insects. Sonia is the embodiment of “anxious but managing” and her financial need for this job makes her set aside obvious red flags even as she acknowledges their existence. She’s relatable and, while not fallible, has her heart in the right place, which makes up for Kingfisher’s very modern dialogue for the purported historical setting.
The plot takes a while to get going and doesn’t really pick up until halfway in when there’s a possum incident that is pretty creepy. This didn’t hold my enjoyment of the story back, though, because of all the lush and surprisingly informed detail regarding Harder’s research on insects and Sonia’s own expertise in plants. I also enjoyed the cast of side characters, who felt like the types of folks you probably would meet on a large but oddly depopulated estate. Kingfisher handles racial and post-Reconstruction tensions in a matter of fact manner, and characters are overall more concerned with their day to day lives than overarching issues largely outside of their control. I felt like this worked for the pace and the themes of this book, although I can also see some feeling like it’s too conveniently handled.
The real joy is this is a proper horror book with the parasitic insects truly gross and the danger that builds quietly exploding very satisfyingly. There isn’t a great deal of mystery, but Kingfisher’s descriptions of the parasites’ behaviour and how they affect the host don’t skimp on detail and feel realistic for the circumstances. Sonia’s position as an outsider to the status quo is used to great effect, allowing the reader to discover the various horrors along with her without overly long asides by other characters. Wolf-Worm straddles the burgeoning subgenre of cosy horror without falling into the trap of coddling the reader.
Rating: ★★★★½
The Black Hunger by Nicholas Pullen
I had gotten this book for my birthday last year and had tried to start it at least three times before I finally finished it this week. Pullen’s debut is a slow starter, giving vibes of a Dracula meets cannibalistic The Historian horror extravaganza. In my opinion, this is less gothic and more historical horror with much of the narrative hinging upon how the black hunger and the undead have tried to rise to power over the centuries. It’s dense and, particularly for the first half of the book, quite academic for better and for worse.
The story has essentially two narrators: a main narrator with John Sackville, the son of the Earl of Dorset and who is writing his memoirs of his life and love for his manservant,Garrett Benson, from a prison cell; and Dr. Samuel Abravanel, who is a Jewish doctor hired to investigate the madness of a woman he loves but cannot marry, Clara. John’s narration is extremely slow paced as he and Garrett go to Oxford and develop an interest in Buddhism and “the Orient” with great attention paid to long conversations between characters essentially engaging in political and religious dialogue through the Socratic method. While some of this is John’s narrative voice, I’m unsure if Pullen subverted or played into colonial stereotypes, and I also got the impression that he wrote this book because he thinks himself very smart and educated. I felt like I was reading something modern and excessively dated at the same time.
Once Abravanel is introduced, the pace of the story picks up and the horror elements truly begin to take shape. I honestly wish he was the main character and the epistolary elements employed in his section were particularly effective, especially with demonstrating the onset of the black hunger. The details of the demons, dark rituals, and violence were delightful, which thankfully carried over when the story returned to John’s memoir. The finale of the book is chaotic and unbalanced, although it hits its main emotional note well. Overall, this is an uneven novel that seems to have struggled to figure out exactly how it wanted to tell its own story.
Rating: ★★½☆☆
Books I Did Not Finish
The Buffalo Buffalo Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
This was my second time attempting this book, which I originally thought would be a home run for me. I really, really tried, juggling the very different, often unappealing multiple POVs and their associated timelines. I liked the life-like quality of all of the narrating characters, but I found some of the style of narration to be confusing with deluges of additional characters appearing all at once. I ultimately decided to let this go about a quarter of the way in: the narration introduced the vampiric creature and I actually became less invested.
The Book That Broke the World by Mark Lawrence
I was uncertain if I’d finish this book based on my mixed feelings about the first in the series. In some ways, Lawrence picks up exactly where he left off, but he also adds another set of characters in yet another time period into the equation. While I do like the two new main characters, and this is shorter than the first book, I found we were back to the plodding pace that bogged down the first book but without the mystery of the library to tantalise the reader. I let this go about halfway through because I wasn’t motivated to keep reading.
The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia
A queer novella about blood magic, plague, and belonging, this looked like a slamdunk for me. Unfortunately, I found the actual plot around the plague to be pretty dull and a distraction from the complex and dense worldbuilding, which made the plodding pace confusing and unsatisfying. While I know that the plot will pick up after where I left off half way through (it has to, this is a novella after all), I'm not motivated to keep going since what has made me interested is the structure of Qilwa and not the characters themselves.
The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas
This is a good novel by Cañas and a solid debut for her back in 2022. A gothic house story set directly following the Mexican War of Independence, Beatriz is newly wedded to Rodolpho and has moved to his family estate, Hacienda San Isidro. The house has fallen into disrepair during the war, and the staff is reduced, but Beatriz is happy to take on the renovations and make the place her own. Very quickly, the house is revealed to be sinister, and no one around Beatriz, including standoffish Rodolpho’s sister, Juana, and the mysterious Padre Andrés, is exactly who they seem.
I really liked the relationship between Beatriz and Andrés. The circumstances that draw them together to try to solve the haunting of San Isidro make sense: Beatriz wants to be safe and in control in her new home, and Andrés has a family connection to the house and land. The tension between them is doubtlessly romantic, but they are both more focused on their own goals, standing in society, and interpersonal relationships. In a way, this is a story of both of them learning to claim their own identities and agency, even if it goes against the grain.
Cañas’s writing is tight although somewhat simplistic, which supports fast-paced action but leaves some of the environment and side characters behind. The interior of the house is hard to imagine since it’s at once very large yet also very small with most action taking place in a small handful of rooms. Beatriz starts the novel working on the gardens, but this is quickly dropped as the spectral and violent happenings pick up in the house. I didn’t find this book to be particularly scary, rather a good romp with likeable main characters and a satisfying ending.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
The Legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox by Katrina Kwan
A spirited East Asian folklore inspired tale in the vein of Kwan’s previous work, The Last Dragon of the East, Yue is a nine-tailed fox spirit who is captured by the famed demon hunter, Sonam. Through a series of unfortunate events, they along with Sonam’s two companions become trapped in Hell where they must face trials set by mercurial gods and, ultimately, their own pasts and faults. This is a focused and not overly complex adventure, action-packed and full of heart and imagination.
At the same time, the pace can be too fast-paced with characters zipping from trial to trial, and I never felt like the characters are truly in danger except when the actual major villain is involved. Most twists and turns can be seen from a mile away, and there’s elements of dungeon crawling through Hell, which only works if tension exists. The POVs switching between Yue and Sonam are pretty well-balanced until that major villain fully comes into play, and then we’re locked into Sonam’s POV to build tension. I felt like the choice weakened Yue’s strong character to make her a more appealing romantic partner.
Throughout the novel there are intermittent chapters that tell a modified version of the Chang’e and Hon Yi folktale and integrates it into the story. I found these short bits to be what I looked forward to the most, and I ended up wishing we could spend more time and detail on them as the information shared there really added to the main story. Overall, this is a nice romp of a book that would be satisfying to younger YA readers or as a vacation read.
Rating: ★★½☆☆
Weavingshaw by Heba Al-Wasity
First book in a trilogy
This is Al-Wasity’s debut, a sometimes too ambitious gothic romantasy that speaks to Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Reylo. Leena, desperate to obtain an expensive cure for her sick brother, goes to the Saint of Silence, St. Silas, to sell her great secret: she can see and, to a certain extent, communicate with the restless dead. A genre-aware novel that excels in its characters and certain environmental details, it does a great job with the ghosts and Leena being realistically afraid and drawn to their plights. It does rather less well with the awkward political asides that introduce slews of additional characters, end up driving the plot, and in which Leena is almost always off-screen.
For me, the romantic tension between Leena and St. Silas both came out of nowhere and was utterly foreseeable. They function as enemies working together for mutual gain until suddenly they don’t: Leena’s resentment of St. Silas seems to conveniently evaporate and his reserve is peeled back less like layers on an onion and more like it was put in a food processor and rapidly pulsed. I hate to say it, but I felt like St. Silas was gradually woobified, and, predictably, once that began happening, we had to be introduced to a true predator to Leena’s safety. This ends up straddling grimdark and gothic in its details but solidly reads as a toxic romance overall.
I did like the atmosphere of Weavingshaw, and, if I read the next book in the series, I am eager to see Leena return there. I am also interested in the mysteries surrounding Leena’s family, broken and separated first by civil war and then the many disadvantages of being refugees. I liked that relationships between Leena and her surviving family members are fraught and rooted in how trauma and systematic oppression can warp people even when they have the best intentions. Based upon the ending, the next book should deal more deeply with those family issues and possibly offer Leena some character growth not driven by a man. Overall, there’s a lot of meat on the bones of this one, but it could have been longer in the oven.
Rating: ★★½☆☆
Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas
Cañas offers a unique take on the vampire genre, interweaving the Mexican American War and class tension between ranchers and vaqueros. The main characters, Nena and Néstor are childhood friends who were on the cusp of youthful love when they’re attacked by a mysterious creature, giving Nena a seemingly fatal injury and forcing Néstor to flee. When they reunite years later with war on their doorstep, Nena has become a healer but lives with the threat of marriage to a wealthy business partner of her family looming over her head; meanwhile, Néstor has come into his own as a successful and respected vaquero, but he remains haunted by the events of the night back when they were thirteen. Obviously, misunderstandings and many, occasionally convoluted action sequences ensue.
Out of Cañas’s novels, this one has the oddest pacing, especially at the beginning after the opening chapter and midway as Nena and Néstor travel together. While both of these sections are full of tension-building content as Nena and Néstor’s relationship continually shifts, both characters suffer from their inability to say anything straight to each other except when under duress from outside forces. It’s not as frustrating as it could be as either Americans or vampires inevitably appear and get them to move along with their emotional constipation, and I did find the finale to be a good pay off with both characters becoming extremely self-aware.
I really liked how the vampire tropes were played with in this, and I loved the twist in the second half as to why the vampire attacks had so noticeably increased. The twist also gave both Néstor and Nena an opportunity to shine, since they both come with their own knowledge of how to deal with the vampires, and the creatures give them a common enemy even when the two of them are being excessively petty. Cañas also did a great job with the setting in this, using the difficult terrain and hot, intense climate to make the story tangible and immersive. Overall, I enjoyed this, and I’m glad I returned to it after I shelved it a few chapters in a couple years ago.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Cinder House by Freya Marske
This is a truly lovely novella that takes a fun spin with the Cinderella tale. Ella, killed by her stepmother, Patrice, at sixteen along with her father, has become a ghost bound to the house she died in. Only Patrice and her daughters, Greta and Danica, who live in the house, and a fairy in the nearby city named Quaint can see her. For the next six years, Ella learns how to be a ghost and, more importantly, how to push the boundaries of her haunting to gradually leave the house and explore the world around her until she’s forced to return home at the stroke of midnight.
I think what made this retelling really work for me was how Prince Jule’s ball is three evenings long, and each night offers Ella more opportunities to explore his world and get to know him as well as building mystery around the foreign princess Nadia. As this is a novella, every mystery progresses quickly and reveals are made night to night, but it’s well-paced and new twists lead directly to new conclusions. I really enjoyed how Ella grew so much in this section of the novel, like the magic around her helps her in taking control of her own destiny rather than the other way around.
The machinations of Patrice and Greta are refreshingly realistic: Patrice, like many women who have gone through hardship, ultimately seeks security, and Greta serves as an example of what happens to a child who is spoiled rotten. Details are well-spent with the limited space of the novella, and I personally enjoyed the ending, even though it’s a bit self-indulgent. Why not? It’s a fairy tale after all.
Rating: ★★★★★
The Tropic of Serpents by Marie Brennan
Second book in The Memoirs of Lady Trent series
Taking place about three years after the first book, we join Isabella as she prepares to go on a new expedition to study dragons, this time to Eriga, a pseudo-African country that is in a precarious political position. Despite itself and even its own protagonist’s desires, this entry in the series has much more to say politically and socially than on the topic of dragons themselves. Some of the commentary and thinly veiled parallels to real world history hits the mark, while others range from eye-rolling to deeply cringe-worthy.
This book shines in its environment details along with the delightful occasional drawing. I absolutely loved the lush descriptions of the various locales and animals encountered in Eriga, which is also why I wished there was more time spent on the dragons. When Isabella gets to actually talk about dragons and certain flora and fauna, her characteristic enthusiasm and raw wonder is infectious and feels very real. She has also grown a great deal from the first book, and the trials and tribulations in this make her continue to grow as a person, as a naturalist, and as a citizen of the world. Her character journey is satisfying, rewarding, and, when focused on the natural world, extremely fun.
Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy how some of the overarching themes of colonialism and racism were handled. The design of some of the Eriga characters, especially those in authority positions, raised some questions and more than a few eyebrows for me regarding the writer’s own understanding of the cultures being meshed together. There were a lot of important plot points that get wrapped up in the sense of the event itself but have notably wider-reaching consequences. Most of these are in the vein of political turmoil and unrest, which stretches beyond the current boundaries of the first two novels. I rated this three stars because there are a number of threads started here that I am curious to see progress in the next book, but I’m not sure if I’m up for more hamfisted pseudo-Victorian nonsense.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
This book is hard to classify: it’s social commentary more than anything else with elements of horror, fantasy, and sci-fi to give structure to the narrative, which is all told through the extremely unreliable lens of the main character, Natsuki. The overall tone is bizarrely light-hearted as Natsuki goes through her life with an increasing amount of detachment and delusion, often utterly alone and only occasionally surrounded by her few supporters: her cousin, Yuu, with whom she has an incestuous relationship with starting in their preteens, and her husband, Tomoya, who she met through a matchmaking website and married based upon his desire for a sexless marriage. Murata’s narrative construction is masterful, dividing the majority of entwined events into two parts: the first in Natsuki’s preteen years, the second during the third year of her marriage.
Natsuki’s upbringing is abusive, particularly from her mother who pits her two daughters against each other and verbally and physically abuses Natsuki. At cram school, Natsuki is sexually abused by a well-liked teacher, and her attempts to seek help are viciously turned back on her by family and friends. It’s distressingly easy to see why Natsuki would spend the majority of her time daydreaming she’s a magician, who will one day be saved by her magical powers or aliens, and how she becomes attached to Yuu, her gentle cousin who is the only person in her life who listens to her and who she only sees once a year when their families visit their grandparents in the mountain village of Akishina. Family, friends, and society routinely fail to meet Natsuki’s needs and push her to try any avenue to defend herself, trying to fulfil the most important promise Yuu and her make: survive at all costs.
None of this happens in isolation: by the time Natsuki and Tomoya are married, they know they’re just cogs in the machine, or, as they call it, the Factory. After the loss of both of their jobs, they go to Akishina where Yuu is temporarily living after also losing his job. The events that pan out from there become progressively more wild and eventually pass beyond the pale, which both enforces and loses some of the message about the tragedy and impossibility of perfect conformity that Murata goes to all lengths to explain. In a weird way, Natsuki could never be anything else but an alien in a world where women are to blame for the mistakes and cruelties of others, and the real question is who is truly responsible for the consequences?
Rating: ★★★★☆
Innamorata by Ava Reid
First book in The House of Teeth duology
This is Reid’s adult novel debut, a dark gothic fantasy that is essentially a reskinned Gormenghast world populated with morally grey to bankrupt characters. Our main POV character is Agnes, the silent cousin of the current head of the House of Teeth, Marioza. She travels with her cousin to be her companion in her betrothal to Prince Liuprand and to fulfil the mission her grandmother gave her to recover and restore their House’s ancestral magic from the books in the palace library. Once at Castle Peake, Agnes begins swiftly to learn that even the best laid plans go awry: Marioza and Agnes have always been unnaturally close, and Liuprand’s entrance in their carefully balanced lives is the least of their worries.
For all the other reviewers I’ve seen complaining about the lack of content warnings, I’m complaining about how this book does a disservice to Reid’s own strengths. Reid is particularly good at developing complex, morally grey characters and lushly atmospheric settings, which is why I’ve read a number of her books. Unfortunately, Innamorata feels like a repetitively remixed ASOIAF Red Wedding combined with the insular and self-indulgent foundation (and trappings, and character archetypes, etc, etc) of Gormenghast. Subsequently, this book tips beyond darkly gothic into grimdark, which wouldn’t bother me if it was appropriately marketed as such. The inherent grimdark marker of on-screen major taboos is very much present, and the horror waffles from gross to eye-rolling to even cringe-worthy rather than evoking the macabre.
While I did like Agnes as a main character, it’s extremely hard to like literally anything else. I found the most tension-ridden scene to be a birthing sequence in the middle of the book because it is the most focused, making great use of the most interesting characters and finally revealing some of their true functions. The rest of the story is bogged down with too many characters of little consequence and Reid’s verbosity, which is a strength of her other novels but confusing to excruciating here. In the past I’ve forgiven and even praised Reid for how some of her books read like self-indulgent fic of specific literary and pop culture touchstones, but I can’t forgive this messily structured and ultimately boring book.
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
Wolf-Worm by T. Kingfisher
This is an excellent outing by Kingfisher that plays to her strengths: a dynamic, well-crafted main narrator, lush environmental details, and a fairly straightforward plot take allows the linear plot to progress without impediment. The year is 1899 and Sonia Wilson, a scientific illustrator, has just arrived in Chatham, North Carolina, to start her new job for Dr. Halder, who is working on a manuscript about parasitic insects. Sonia is the embodiment of “anxious but managing” and her financial need for this job makes her set aside obvious red flags even as she acknowledges their existence. She’s relatable and, while not fallible, has her heart in the right place, which makes up for Kingfisher’s very modern dialogue for the purported historical setting.
The plot takes a while to get going and doesn’t really pick up until halfway in when there’s a possum incident that is pretty creepy. This didn’t hold my enjoyment of the story back, though, because of all the lush and surprisingly informed detail regarding Harder’s research on insects and Sonia’s own expertise in plants. I also enjoyed the cast of side characters, who felt like the types of folks you probably would meet on a large but oddly depopulated estate. Kingfisher handles racial and post-Reconstruction tensions in a matter of fact manner, and characters are overall more concerned with their day to day lives than overarching issues largely outside of their control. I felt like this worked for the pace and the themes of this book, although I can also see some feeling like it’s too conveniently handled.
The real joy is this is a proper horror book with the parasitic insects truly gross and the danger that builds quietly exploding very satisfyingly. There isn’t a great deal of mystery, but Kingfisher’s descriptions of the parasites’ behaviour and how they affect the host don’t skimp on detail and feel realistic for the circumstances. Sonia’s position as an outsider to the status quo is used to great effect, allowing the reader to discover the various horrors along with her without overly long asides by other characters. Wolf-Worm straddles the burgeoning subgenre of cosy horror without falling into the trap of coddling the reader.
Rating: ★★★★½
The Black Hunger by Nicholas Pullen
I had gotten this book for my birthday last year and had tried to start it at least three times before I finally finished it this week. Pullen’s debut is a slow starter, giving vibes of a Dracula meets cannibalistic The Historian horror extravaganza. In my opinion, this is less gothic and more historical horror with much of the narrative hinging upon how the black hunger and the undead have tried to rise to power over the centuries. It’s dense and, particularly for the first half of the book, quite academic for better and for worse.
The story has essentially two narrators: a main narrator with John Sackville, the son of the Earl of Dorset and who is writing his memoirs of his life and love for his manservant,Garrett Benson, from a prison cell; and Dr. Samuel Abravanel, who is a Jewish doctor hired to investigate the madness of a woman he loves but cannot marry, Clara. John’s narration is extremely slow paced as he and Garrett go to Oxford and develop an interest in Buddhism and “the Orient” with great attention paid to long conversations between characters essentially engaging in political and religious dialogue through the Socratic method. While some of this is John’s narrative voice, I’m unsure if Pullen subverted or played into colonial stereotypes, and I also got the impression that he wrote this book because he thinks himself very smart and educated. I felt like I was reading something modern and excessively dated at the same time.
Once Abravanel is introduced, the pace of the story picks up and the horror elements truly begin to take shape. I honestly wish he was the main character and the epistolary elements employed in his section were particularly effective, especially with demonstrating the onset of the black hunger. The details of the demons, dark rituals, and violence were delightful, which thankfully carried over when the story returned to John’s memoir. The finale of the book is chaotic and unbalanced, although it hits its main emotional note well. Overall, this is an uneven novel that seems to have struggled to figure out exactly how it wanted to tell its own story.
Rating: ★★½☆☆
Books I Did Not Finish
The Buffalo Buffalo Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
This was my second time attempting this book, which I originally thought would be a home run for me. I really, really tried, juggling the very different, often unappealing multiple POVs and their associated timelines. I liked the life-like quality of all of the narrating characters, but I found some of the style of narration to be confusing with deluges of additional characters appearing all at once. I ultimately decided to let this go about a quarter of the way in: the narration introduced the vampiric creature and I actually became less invested.
The Book That Broke the World by Mark Lawrence
Second book in The Library Trilogy
I was uncertain if I’d finish this book based on my mixed feelings about the first in the series. In some ways, Lawrence picks up exactly where he left off, but he also adds another set of characters in yet another time period into the equation. While I do like the two new main characters, and this is shorter than the first book, I found we were back to the plodding pace that bogged down the first book but without the mystery of the library to tantalise the reader. I let this go about halfway through because I wasn’t motivated to keep reading.
The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia
A queer novella about blood magic, plague, and belonging, this looked like a slamdunk for me. Unfortunately, I found the actual plot around the plague to be pretty dull and a distraction from the complex and dense worldbuilding, which made the plodding pace confusing and unsatisfying. While I know that the plot will pick up after where I left off half way through (it has to, this is a novella after all), I'm not motivated to keep going since what has made me interested is the structure of Qilwa and not the characters themselves.
