altlovesbooks

Like if Oceans 8 had a focus on Fast and Furious's family, but set in a cyberpunky space station with lots of representation. You've got a team of people set on liberating valuable items from a corporate CEO with the intent to ransom them back to him and make bank. That's basically it, but it was enough for me.

I'm gonna fly in the face of everyone here who had complaints about the boring plot and say up front that the plot is secondary to the characterization. Is the heist fun? Absolutely. It's clear the author did a lot of cybersecurity/physical security research, and it shows without being too bogged down in technical minutiae. Is it incredibly satisfying/tense/subtle/layered? Not particularly. There isn't a lot unexpected here to keep anyone guessing. But I thought the real joy in this book, and the reason for the five stars, was getting to know Edie and Angel and the complex relationship between them. Even the secondary characters, the people making up the crew, were interesting, I thought, and each had their personal strengths they brought to the table to make the heist happen.

I especially enjoyed the Hawaiian lens we experience the story through. I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator really nailed all the various slang/pidgin thrown in to really bring conversations to life. I wish that I had a bit of translation or a glossary or something to reference sometimes, though, but context clues did a good job of carrying meaning through.

Just a fun heist with colorful characters in a unique setting. Highly enjoyed it.

This is a hard book to rate/explain, but here goes.

Margo and Patricia are both librarians at a small public library branch in the Chicago 'burbs. Margo arrived earlier in the year than Patricia, and was a nurse prior to her (forced) career change. You see, (and this is all in the first chapter, so not a spoiler), 'Margo' is not Margo at all, and is instead a persona she created to distance herself from all the patients she killed at previous jobs. Now she's a librarian trying not to draw attention to herself, trying to acclimate to a job where people don't come in sick and reliant upon her to keep them alive, trying and sort of failing at keeping these intrusive thoughts at bay. Patricia is a failed writer trying a career change into something more reliable, trying and failing to resist the urge to write, trying to appease her loser of a boyfriend she doesn't seem to like too much. But when Margo starts behaving strangely at the library, she starts writing this down, and unwittingly turning Margo into a character for one of her books. She starts watching Margo closely, and by extension, starts drawing closer to Margo's truth.

The story is told from each of their viewpoints, and both are unreliable narrators, and also pretty unlikeable. 'Margo' is unlikeable just by merit of being a serial killer, but also because she has some pretty savage things she thinks about the patrons who come into her library (and admittedly that hits close to home). Patricia is unlikeable for folding like a lawn chair when her boyfriend tells her that basically everything she does is terrible, for stringing said boyfriend along for so long, for being so adverse to the idea of writing, and for (late story spoilers here) never turning Margo in, despite all the things she discovers about her. But unlikeable characters are sort of the point of this story, as a feature, not a bug. Most of this story wouldn't work if people behaved as they should, because this is a story about two liars, not just one.

I think my only hangup about this book was the ending. (ending spoilers here) I thought, for all the buildup we got between Margo and Patricia, I was expecting more of an explosive finale. And while the building burning down is, by definition, explosive, the actual dispute was over so abruptly. I don't know, for all of the slow burn, I feel like the ending should have been a bit more satisfying. I did like how the author turned Patricia into another Margo at the end, though. That was a really nice twist.

So, a great story marred by not sticking the landing. It's a slow burn, not quite action-packed, but psychological enough that I was entertained throughout.

I haven't had a book make me feel more unwelcome to read it since I read Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi. The difference is that I went into Goliath knowing I wasn't the target audience and rated accordingly. For this one, I wasn't quite prepared for the amount of fights this book picked about gender and racial issues, and I had a nagging feeling the entire time that it didn't need to be this way.

I actually really liked this take on a post-apocalyptic society. Rather than the main characters being survivalists, being prepared for everything, being ready to plow through all adversaries in their way, this book focuses on two rather ordinary suburbanites from New Jersey trying to reach their daughter in California. A plague wiped out a large chunk of the world's population, leaving the rest behind immune to the disease. In the wake of the plague, society fractures, narrows in on itself, and the simple act of reaching a loved one across the country becomes incredibly difficult.

Right up front I'll say that I loved the writing in this book. I loved experiencing how a world-ending plague changes your average family's outlook, and how they grapple with old-world morals about stealing and killing and helping fellow survivors. The author did a fantastic job of painting how the world changed for average Americans.

But.....and here's a huge but.....the author really comes out swinging with a myriad of societal hangups they clearly have. The couple featured in this book are biracial, and right out the gate we get a lot of passages about how nearly everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen in the future is the fault of white males in society. Which, fine, we can talk about those issues, I have no problem with it and do see a lot of it in society, but the lengths this author goes to really pin every struggle in this book on that demographic is really quite impressive. We also get an extensive scene in the book where it feels like the fourth wall comes down and the author talks to the reader about legalization of marijuana, living in the present being optimal and 'the future' being a societal concept invented to generate stress, and other airy philosophical topics that don't seem to have a bearing on the book. It really felt shoehorned in. The ending also kind of had some vague (ending spoilers here) ideas about religion being bad and atheism being good, which, while I'm not religious, felt a bit like the author taking the mic again.

Ultimately I gave this book 3 and a half stars, but it fought me the entire way. I wanted so bad to rate it higher given how I enjoyed the premise, but it really felt like the author had a ton of axes to grind in it.

"Everything rests on a knife's edge."

I realized when making my to-read list for this year that, for whatever reason, I had gotten up to book five of this amazing series years ago and never bothered to finish it up. I went into it a bit hesitant after being gone from the desert for so long, but this book delivered and then some. An amazing end to an epic fantasy series I wish more people knew about.

I'm not going to summarize the plot here because it's the culmination of five books of setup. Not only would it not make sense to someone jumping in fresh, it'd also be rife with spoilers from the previous books. You'll just have to trust me that this book's story is a worthy conclusion to this desert fantasy series.

All of our favorite cast members are here, with nothing and nobody extraneous. I felt some of the previous books dragged on a bit (Beneath the Twisted Trees, I'm looking at you), but this book has the advantage of being set up to be wall-to-wall plot with nothing really new in the mix. Watching everything come together was delightful. I also appreciated that the author included a 'Story so Far' section up front to catch readers up to speed, because a lot happens in the previous books.

Just a great book, a great end, to a great series. Well done.

I guess I was expecting something different when my friends and I picked this one up. It's supposedly what inspired Lovecraft to create his entire mythos, so I was expecting something more...I don't know...existential horror? Unsettling? I didn't really get much of that. It was a fine read, just not what I was expecting, I guess.

It's a series of four short stories about a mysterious book, 'The King In Yellow', where anyone who picks it up to read goes mad. Each of the four stories features a different person in a different setting, but beyond the common thread of the book, there isn't a lot to really explain what this book is, where it came from, or why it is the way it is. As the reader, you're just along for the 'how is this person going to manifest their madness' ride, with no real backstory or explanation.

There's a lot of unreliable narrator business going on, obviously, which I thought was fun. You're never quite sure if things actually happen the way things are written, and there's some room to draw conclusions of your own at the end of each story. There's also some unexpected humor written in by the author in the form of descriptions of places and people, which I enjoyed but also felt tonally different than what I was expecting out of the story.

So, not bad, but also don't go into this expecting Lovecraft. It's a neat read featuring unreliable narrators, but I really didn't feel existentially horrified or even mildly concerned at all while reading it.

I refuse to give this the thriller tag, because it's not all that thrilling.

Nora is a neuroarchitect (yeah, I had to look that up too) living in Brooklyn with boyfriend Jack. She's...not exactly estranged from her family, but near enough to it. Her father, Liam, dies suddenly from falling off a cliff at his California home. Whoops. Brother Sam contacts Nora, suspicious about the cause of death being ruled an accident, and whisks Nora away to do some whirlwind investigating in California. What's covered in this book is the complicated history of this family, Nora's reluctance to form attachments with anyone around her, and everyone's extensive backstory which doesn't usually play a part in the eventual resolution of their father's death.

This was way more of a family drama than it was either a mystery or a thriller. The plot moves at a glacial pace, so if you're here for the 'what happened to Liam' portion of this story, settle in for the long haul. I feel like the author tried to do too much with this story, and should have leaned into either a total family drama and left the murder mystery out of it, or a total murder mystery and left the rest of the family baggage out. As it is, we bounce between ideas a lot during the bulk of this story, and it takes forever for any one of the ideas to reach something close to a conclusion.

I also kind of didn't like Nora as a character either. She has commitment issues, and large parts of this book are her mental thoughts about how she should call boyfriend Jack to check in, continues to not do so, actively ignore his texts, and generally treats what seems like a great guy terribly. The relationship drama included in this book felt entirely unnecessary.

Kind of a miss with me. It's short though!

I'm no stranger to books about conditions in North Korea, so it's hard for me to say that I didn't really enjoy the presentation of this one. We get the story of Shin, escapee from Camp 14, the only one so far who was born in the camp and who managed to escape. We learn a lot about conditions within Camp 14, but only from Shin's perspective. From the author's commentary, it sounds like his position within the camp was actually fairly privileged, which makes this even tougher to read knowing that even worse things were undoubtedly happening elsewhere. Shin reveals what it took for him to survive, the indoctrination he underwent that warped his view of the people around him, and how he finally broke through it all and escaped.

It's a powerful story, but the author notes early on that Shin wasn't very forthcoming initially, and even after telling his story to the author, changed it at least once. He also comes off as being very disconnected and uncaring about what was going on around him, but it's hard to say if that was the author's voice retelling Shin's story, or a disassociation from what was happening on his part. Either way, it was hard connecting with the story being told.

Finally, I had a hard time with the author acting as a narrator during Shin's story, where we'd suddenly get some North Korean backstory related to something Shin said in the middle of his story. Maybe Shin's story would've connected with me more if we didn't keep having asides in the middle of things.

It's still a powerful book, these small issues aside. Even if only a portion of what Shin said is true as told, it still shines an important light on the terrible conditions within North Korea.

Mal (short for Malware) is an AI stuck in the world of humans. When a conflict between body-modded Federals and anti-modding Humanists breaks out, the larger information network is blocked, leaving Mal stuck inside whatever implant or device is large enough to contain him. In his quest to find a way back to the information network, he inhabits various drones, corpses, a few live humans, and finds a small group of friends along the way that he feels obligated to keep safe as well.

This is hyped up to be like Martha Wells' Murderbot books, and I do see signs of that. Mal has a very dry sense of humor, being AI, and the majority of this book is his wry observations about humans and human behavior. This is very much a character-driven story, in that the plot, such as it is, isn't really a factor until the last few chapters of the book. You have the backdrop of this large conflict, but you don't get a lot of backstory (or...forwardstory, for that matter) about what it is or why it's happening. Even the ending, where the plot finally appears, is kind of forgettable, because the rest of the book didn't really set you up to care about a resolution. I also found the conflict and resolution a bit messy, to be honest.

So, the humor was pretty decent, but the rest of the book was unfocused and didn't get me to care much about the ending. Kind of a miss.

"I reckon you had a decent life and died a decent death. Ain't that enough?"

A pleasant, but not all that memorable, book about three people who find themselves in the care of Hirasaka, the man who flashes your life before your eyes when you die. Told in three separate stories, Hirasaka tends to an elderly preschool teacher, a Yakuza member, and an abused girl, when they find themselves there on death's doorstep. Two of the three stories begins with a photograph that doesn't quite develop of one of their cherished memories. Hirasaka offers to take them back in time to the period of the memory so they can retake their photograph exactly as they remember it, and we learn the backstory behind each of their memories. The final story framework is a bit different, but ultimately still follows the 'go back in time, get some backstory, take a photo' structure.

It was a decent book, but like I said, not all that memorable. The third story is definitely the most emotional, but I actually enjoyed the second story with the Yakuza member a bit more. Something about Waniguchi's interactions with Mouse and Kosaki really made the story for me, and I kind of liked how pragmatic Waniguchi was about his life in retrospect.

I do wish we learned more about Hiraska himself though, as it felt like some things were set up to make you wonder about him in the beginning, but were dropped by the end. There's no real ending to this book per se; he wraps up the third person's arc, we get a brief scene involving Yama, the guy who brings Hirasaka the information about the people/jobs, and that's the end. I kind of felt like more needed to be said, but I guess the author disagreed.

It's a decent book, but I'm not sure much will stick with me.

Better than the other book by McFadden I read, Never Lie, but still not a super great book. I think I'm just hard to please when it comes to mysterious thrillers.

We have two points of time represented in this book. Present day Sydney who broke up with her ex- and has been trying to put herself out there on a dating app and be not single because her biological clock is ticking, her mom is harping at her, and god she doesn't want to be old and single is the main focus. The story opens with her matching with Kevin, a creep who misrepresented himself on the app and keeps insinuating himself into Sydney's life, despite being kneed in the manlybits and not taking a hint from there. She has two friends, Bonnie whose scrunchies are part of her identity and nobody else on the planet wears scrunchies except Bonnie, and Gretchen who has an art exhibit at a museum and is dating the weird handyman in Sydney's apartment.

We also have past Tom in high school, who has a weird bug-obsessed friend named....something (I can't recall his real name, was it ever mentioned?), but everyone calls him Slug because he eats bugs. Tom has a crush on classmate Daisy, has an alcoholic and abusive father, and a weak mother who puts up with it all. He's also strangely obsessed with and gets excited by blood. We get chapters about Tom navigating his crush on Daisy, them becoming something adjacent to boyfriend/girlfriend in a clean hand holding sort of way, and Slug being awkward, while drama at school about a missing classmate escalates and makes Tom a person of interest.

Honestly I was way more invested in Tom's past chapters than I was in Sydney's chapters. I thought Sydney was an idiot who managed to surround herself with people waving all manner of red flags for a multitude of reasons. The degree she blinds herself to what's going on around her for the sake of sex with a Hot Guy is mind-boggling, actually, and the mental gymnastics she goes through to rationalize things after the fact is rather amazing. I realize most of what's going on around Sydney is the author's love of misdirection, but I feel like the main character should at least be mildly concerned about any number of things she doesn't seem to care about. It's wild.

Also, as a person who proudly wears scrunchies in the Year of Our Lord 2025, I'm rather offended at Sydney getting so hung up on the concept of people wearing scrunchies in today times. Everytime she came across one in the story, only Bonnie could have worn it, because Bonnie was the only person who would ever wear a scrunchie. It's inconceivable anyone else would, really. They're so dated. Jeez.

I thought the twist was unexpected though, even if the ending to it all was hard to believe. And it did keep me reading, so it's an entertaining read, if you can get past the main character being so dense.

When you have 50 essays on a wide variety of food-related topics in a book less than 300 pages, you get a lot of breadth but not a lot of depth. At roughly 5 pages a topic, be prepared for the interesting bits you dig out of here to be glossed over and forgotten about. There's a lot of interesting food trivia here, but in digestible factoid form. The essays start in prehistory and work their way forwards in time which was nice, but aside from that have little to do with one another, lending the whole book kind of a fragmented feel. I found a few chapters interesting, but because I couldn't tell you what they are now that I've finished the book, I can say that the whole experience was a little forgettable.

Also, the author has a clear idea of what she thinks food consumption looks like in an ideal world, so you'll see a lot of that as well. I have zero problems with veganism even if I'm not part of that group, but I got a bit bored of seeing it come up so often.

An acceptable book with interesting factoids, but also not interesting enough to really stick with me.

I sort of expected more from a mystery thriller set in old 1920s Hollywood. Maybe that was a me and my expectations problem?

Mary Rourke is someone movie studios call on when they need something fixed or resolved quietly that might have a PR impact. She's called to the home of Norma Carlton, a household name in silent films, because she was found dead. She's also working on a film Hollywood can't stop talking about, The Devil's Playground, an open secret everyone knows about but nobody wants anything to do with because of a curse. She sets about investigating this woman's murder to see if there's something larger at play than what it appears on the surface, and finds out there's an entire dark underside to Hollywood she wasn't prepared for.

There's also a second viewpoint mentioned in the summary of this book, but only appears in the very beginning and at the very end, to introduce the reader to the idea of The Devil's Playground being this lost film nobody has a copy of and to bring the whole thing to a close. I don't really consider this book a dual viewpoint story, as the vast majority is from Mary Rourke's viewpoint, with some interspersed historical chapters involving some essential backstory.

Right off the bat I want to say that I thought the writing was excellent. I love my descriptive scenes, and this book really nails the feel of 1920s prohibition Hollywood. Full points for that. I also like Mary Rourke's character, and thought she was a great person to share this story with. She seems smart, no-nonsense, and able to handle all the alpha personalities around her fairly well. It's also clear that the author did their homework on 1920s Hollywood, as there's a lot of details included within the story that sometimes was distracting.

Unfortunately, I thought the overall mystery was kind of lackluster and overdeveloped for the eventual payoff. I didn't really see the ending coming, and felt like a lot of what happened before wasn't all that relevant in hindsight. This overdevelopment also led to so many characters to keep up with, all with delightfully generic Hollywood names, that I had a hard time remembering who was who until well into a conversation.

It was just an okay book in the end, but ultimately not very memorable.

DNF @ 41%

I'm no stranger to Japanese fiction or their slice of life-style books, but I never really got into this one. There's plenty here about pianos and piano tuning that I wasn't aware of which was interesting, but I never really got into the main character's mental hurdles behind becoming a respected piano tuner, which was the bulk of the book up until this point. There definitely seems to be people who really enjoyed this book, and I wish I could stick it through to the end to see why, but having to force myself to read even a few pages was my cue to move on.

Three witch sisters run a tea shop specializing in reading tea leaves. They grew up together and are very close, and all live together in a house that just wants the best for its inhabitants. Unfortunately this closeness starts to chafe, as they're given a seemingly impossible task to complete by the council of witches, or else their shop will be taken away. Suddenly a very close bond between the three of them starts to unravel, as each gets tempted away from working together by the promise of something more than reading fortunes.

This was a perfectly acceptable book, but not deep in any way. It's definitely a cozy read, doesn't require a lot of the reader to keep going, and doesn't overstay its welcome. I thought maybe the plot point revolving around uncovering the witchs' tasks was resolved a bit too quickly/easily relative to how important it was made to seem. It almost felt like the book went in just a few too many directions all at once, between (mild plot spoilers here) the witchs' tasks, the curse, and the three sisters' secrets they were keeping from each other. I was puzzled at points in the book at which was the 'main' threat and what was just plot filler.

But it was a cute book, if nothing else. Cozy and quick, I guess is what I can sum it up as.

Okay, going into this, you have to realize that this is very much a Japanese book about a guy who does nothing. That literally means that not a whole lot happens in this book, but it's still quite charming. Our Rental Person is an unassuming guy who found himself unsuited for Japanese corporate life, and wondered if 'doing nothing' could have some sort of social significance. Thus, he rents himself out to people who need someone along who does.....nothing. All he asks is for his travel and expenses to be covered, and you have yourself someone who will listen to your problems without comment, who will attend events and do nothing in the audience, who will eat with you at a restaurant without comment, any number of things.

Whether or not you agree with him and his thinking here aside, I actually enjoyed this book. Rental Person seems to be quite conscientious about having as little impact as possible in other people's lives, and yet still manages to be of service. It's kind of a meandering book, where requests quoted from Twitter are posted alongside his social media commentary tweet about the job, and then the author comments on his particular thoughts about the job. There's not a lot of deep insight here, and especially his thoughts on doing literally nothing are reiterated a ton, but as a surface level story about the myriad strange requests someone gets to do nothing, I thought it succeeded well.

Just a short, sweet book about doing nothing.

I spent the entire book rooting for the Glimmer, if that tells you anything.

These are all deeply unpleasant people thrown together for a dinner event Britta, social media influencer and overuser of hashtags, is putting on to curry favor with some brand she wants to partner with. But her marriage is failing, her kids are more props to her than people, and her friends just don't understand how important this dinner is to her. Liz is also there, shepherding her own failing marriage for not caring about social standing like her husband does, who goes batshit crazy once the Glimmer hits and everyone is stuck in Britta's basement. Every chapter of hers is about how she misses her kids and has no faith in either them or their babysitter to do anything right, and even sets a fire in the basement as a last resort to try and get emergency services to come during a lockdown. Padma is there too, but exists more as a plot device about needing to pump, giving Liz an excuse to rob Britta's house under the guise of looking for a pump, and mastitis. Mabel rounds out the cast of women here, but all the book cares about her is that her husband cheats on her repeatedly and she takes it. There's guys there too, but the book doesn't really care about them beyond being drama fountains.

You never find out what the Glimmer actually was (alien? plague? pathogen?), so all you're really here for is to follow the drama this group of rich people contrive for themselves. The book also moves at a breakneck pace, never really allowing a reader to orient themselves in a scene before blowing onto the next drama plot point. I rolled my eyes more than a few times at how contrived some of the scenes were. Spoilers here: Liz is conveniently a writer for a dystopian TV show and has a bunker and months of supplies in her basement. Britta's husband has a car that has a bio filter, armored like a tank, and allows anyone driving it to instantly become a stunt driver without training. Britta's house has everything from breast pumps to a massive basement so there's never really any threat to our characters, but no antibiotics for Padma because we need her to be sick. There's more examples, but you get the idea.

A quick read, but a disappointing one.

"Everyone thinks they know what's best for the moons. Schoolkids, senators, farmers, factory workers. But so many of them disagree in their answer to one question: Who's human to you?"

Ver and Aryl work in the same science lab, when their mentor, Cal, is mysteriously killed in a variation on a locked-room mystery. The two girls are framed, when neither of them are the ones who did it. Despite being from very different backgrounds and not really knowing the other all that well, the two band together to clear their names, but end up becoming closer as well, as they navigate Ver's wasting disease she was attempting to cure, and Aryl's dream of being a dancer.

It wasn't a bad book, but I felt like it was lacking something to make me feel more for the characters. Ver's chapters, in particular, are written in a certain style to drive home that she's from a different background with different views. I like the science-y factoids/ruminations her chapters open with, but the rest of her chapters were very clinical, like how someone deep in the science world would think. Aryl, in contrast, is very flip, unpredictable, and kind of a party girl in the beginning, despite having lofty goals for herself.

I feel like the relationship that develops between these two needed more time to cook for it to feel authentic. As it is, beyond a few throwaway lines about being impressed by the other, noticing the other being a bit attractive, and silently respecting the other's intelligence, nothing is really expanded on until a switch flips and they're overtly in love with each other. It all felt very instalove-y, which was a bit grating.

Finally, while I liked the undertones about social divides and living with disability in the beginning, it felt increasingly heavy-handed as the book went on. The author has talent in painting the world this book exists in and the society issues it has, but what started subtle and left to the reader to infer ended as a blunt hammer to the head by the end, and I kind of didn't like that.

Still, it was a bit cute, and I did really like the world as depicted by the author.

"I wonder if it matters whose side anyone is on."

I'll just say up front that the 'dystopia' and 'science fiction' tags on this book are misleading. The situation they find themselves in is dystopian for sure, but it's hardly even part of the story for most of the book. The bulk of this book is taken up by exploring the backstories of two guys, Jess and Storey, who were out hunting in Maine when they discover burned downs, blown bridges, and a general information blackout happened while they were disconnected. They wander around Maine a bit, find a very young girl they feel compelled to keep safe, and us as the reader experience a lot of Jess's flashbacks to when him and Storey were teens.

That's basically the book. You do find out what's going on in Maine sort of second-hand, but it's not really fleshed out in any meaningful way other than to provide a reason for these two guys to be out in the woods disconnected for so long. You do, however, get way too much information about Jess's teenage years, (flashback/backstory spoilers here) where Storey's mom evidently seduces Jess when he was 17, and has sex with him at least twice. Jess never told Storey, but evidently Storey knew all along because his mom shacked up with lots of guys. It's actually pretty predatory and gross. The ending also is really abrupt. We could have used at least another chapter or so to find out (ending spoilers) if our guys actually make it out, if they end up telling the girl what happened to her dad and the whole story, anything about the secession, really.

But the environmental detail and writing were all pretty great. I'll probably check out other books by this author, just this one left me wanting quite a bit more.

What a wasted premise. This really felt more like a general fiction/coming of age drama wrapped up in a vaguely sci-fi trenchcoat. I was hoping for something more mysterious and crazy, what with the depiction of the different timeline valleys as they are, but we get none of that. Meh.

A large chunk of this book is spent in Odile's school years, where she's struggling to make friends and figure out where she fits into the larger society. Her mom is pushing her to do one thing, apply for the Conseil apprenticeship where she'd be responsible for vetting requests from residents to visit the other valleys in other timelines for closure reasons, but she's not entirely sure she wants to do that. Her friend Edme, too, wants to become a violinist, but his parents want him to do something more practical. There's some relational development, and just as things start to build up between Edme and Odile, a tragic accident takes his life. His death affects Odile and their other friends greatly, and the rest of the book is about the drastically different path her life takes.

I thought the time travel premise was interesting, but underused in the book. Most of what happens here, save the last 10-20% or so, could have happened in basically any other coming of age drama with some aspects changed. There's no mystery here, there's no intrigue, there's no thriller really, just a friend group coming to terms with the death of one of their own. Once I realized that none of this different valley stuff was going to be explored in any meaningful way, I kind of got bored with the book.

I also thought that Odile as a character was flat and boring. I can't tell if that's by intent (there's hints dropped that she's neurodivergent in some way, but it's never expressly stated) or by poor writing, but she really felt removed and distant from everything that was happening, even stuff happening directly to her. But it made even the emotional parts of the book land kind of flat, because I honestly didn't know if Odile even cared.

I kind of also didn't like the way the ending was handled. (Ending spoilers here) When Odile is meeting with Evrette at the very end of the book, I hated how the threat of unmaking yourself/others was handwaved away as just not mattering sometimes, and that they simplify things to encourage people to comply. It effectively removed any consequences of Odile's actions in saving Edme.

Finally, I listened to the audiobook, but from reading the reviews here, it sounds like the author didn't use any sort of dialogue punctuation, which I absolutely hate. Had I not listened to the book, where it's clear who's speaking when, I would definitely have put this down.

Just a mediocre book. I wasn't on board with the relational drama, and wanted more of the sci-fi, I think.

"If you look at one leaf

You only see that.

If you don't look at any of them

the whole tree appears."

An interesting collection of short stories related to samurai and Bushido that I've had on my to-read list the longest (so far). Some were fun and funny, others were serious, but all of them had some sort of hidden meaning or lesson to learn. I think my favorite of the collection was 'Hideyoshi's Eighth Thought', if only because I could sympathize with the official who kept getting new orders from his lord just as he was about to act on them. Sometimes management do be like that.

Instead of being Yet Another Mythology Retelling where an author picks apart Greek mythology with a female protagonist, we get something a bit more inspired from a reputable author. The result is kind of a fairytale-esque story written using figures from Mayan mythology in a 1920s Mexico historical setting. It sounds like a mishmash of concepts, but I thought it worked well together.

Casiopea works as a servant in her grandfather's house, a glorified floor scrubber and errand runner for the household in a small town in Mexico. But when she accidentally frees the spirit of the Mayan god of Death, she's given the opportunity to finally see the larger world and all the things she's only dreamed of. But it's a dangerous journey she's about to go on with many opposing forces trying to keep the two of them from reaching its end.

I thought it was a really sweet story. There's a bit of romance here between Casiopea and Hun-Kame, but done in a hesitant way since the two of them realize that their situation isn't permanent. I liked that we get to see a lot of personal growth in both Casiopea and Hun-Kame from the journey as well, and some introspection about how the journey changes a person. The setting in Mexico is beautiful, and I loved the descriptions of the different cities they visit along the way, with the author taking care to make them feel distinctive.

I will say that, because of the way the story is intended, the ending is a bit predictable. Ending spoilers here: it never really feels like Casiopea is in danger from anything she's asked to do, despite the warnings she's given, and it does take you a bit out of the story when you realize the thickness of her plot armor. But if you enjoy a journey more than the ending, there's a lot here to like.

Naila attends a magic school for mages without magic. That is, she has the aptitude for it, but for whatever reason, she can't perform any of the same magical benchmarks as her fellow classmates. She's been at this magical school for some time now and has already resigned herself to washing out and all of the baggage that entails, when one of the most powerful wizards in the city takes her under his wing. He's determined to figure out what to do about her problem, and why her magic is different than everyone else's.

We also have Entonin, a priest from a neighboring kingdom with a poor view of mages, arrives in the city with his bodyguard Karameth. Entonin is here ostensibly for negotiations and to try and smooth over feelings on both sides, but is actually there as a spy for a secret organization.

Alongside all of this is Oriven, leader of the city, casually standing up a magic army, seizing control of the food supply, and pitting mage against non-mage citizens. We don't see too much of him directly in this book, but his magical fingers are busily sowing unrest with an eye toward seeing non-mages removed from the city.

I feel like some of the reviews here are too harsh. I will say, the onboarding in this book is difficult to get through. A lot of terms, places, and concepts are thrown at you from the very beginning, and I found myself consulting the glossary in the back fairly often until things started to stick. There's a lot of information dumps early on, paving the way for the rest of the book. I feel like things start smoothing out after the first quarter or so of the book. I also feel like the bad guy of this particular book, Oriven, didn't get nearly enough direct viewpoints. He shows up in two chapters for maybe two pages apiece, and his existence in the rest of the book is other members of the government talking about what new laws he's enacted or what new controversial thing he's done. He's more of a force in this book than he is an actual antagonist.

But I thought the good parts of the book were enough to really make me enjoy this by the end. I thought the writing was descriptive and really pulled me into the city alongside Naila. I thought the political story being told was intriguing, and the last quarter of the book or so really had me on edge. I thought Naila was a really great female lead, and she had one particularly stand-out scene near the end that I loved. The side characters were also all interesting in their own right, which was also nice. I could go for an Entonin/Karameth novella/series, honestly.

All that to say, if you can get through the information flung at you in the beginning, you're rewarded with a pretty interesting political story, a strong female lead I can get behind, and a fantastic ending that leaves me waiting impatiently for the second book.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free ecopy in exchange for an honest review.

A mermaid, estranged from her husband's court (having killed/eaten them all, I presume), is accompanied by a plague doctor who finds her in the aftermath on a journey to escape. On their way they come upon a village consisting entirely of almost feral children—and three surgeons whom the children call saints. The children claim the saints can bring them back to life better than before, but the surgeons are nigh immortal and children brought back are sometimes missing organs. It doesn’t take long for this duo to catch onto the reason behind the immortality, and it’s the plague doctor who wants to save the children whether or not they want to be saved. Unfortunately, good intentions lead to sad conclusions.

Or, at least, that’s what I’m assuming the plot was. Honestly, it felt like the author sorted a thesaurus by least commonly used words and wrote a book using only those. This prose is so purple, it’s almost black. There’s a creepy folklore story buried in here, but not being able to follow along fully with what was going on from scene to scene sometimes really took me out of it. I wish I could rate this book higher, but not being able to fully follow a story makes it difficult for me to recommend it to other people.

Also, there’s lots of visceral detail here. So if excessively detailed surgical scenes, cracked ribcages, eating of eyeballs, descriptions of entrails, and much, much more is not your cup of tea, pass on this.

So the Condor goes missing on Regis III, and our titular ship, the Invincible is tasked with finding out what happened. They land, locate the craft, and find all sorts of unexplainable and mysterious remains. It appears the crew succumbed to some sort of madness, leading them all to die of hunger or exposure, despite there being ample food, water, and shelter available. The environment on land is devoid of life, while the seas show marine creatures with a curious magnetic field sensitivity. There's a strange black cloud that blocks all form of communication, and a strange rain of molten metal. All signs point to something not right on the planet, but nobody's sure quite what that something is immediately. The captain decides to stick around, and his navigator (and our viewpoint) Rohan is tasked with investigating things.

It's an old book, but the story and writing still hold up. The author does an excellent job with characterizing the book's main players, and I was really intrigued with the mystery that the author sets up here on this desert planet. The captain and Rohan butt heads (in a professional way) frequently, as the captain is more of a traditionalist manifest destiny type and Rohan is more practical. The setting and feelings of the crewmates are also done well, leaving me well invested in the outcome of the ship.

I did feel like it lingered a bit too long in the last half of the book on matters of philosophy and characterizing what constitutes life, but it's something that I feel is somewhat common in sci-fi books of this era. Once the author pulls the curtain back a bit behind what's really going on on Regis III, I wanted more movement and resolution, and less musings on various aspects of technology and biology, and feeling beat over the head with the idea that sometimes doing nothing at all is the better route to take.

Still, really enjoyable read. Highly recommend to classic sci-fi fans.

"Drinks. Jokes. Laughter. At the end. I promise."

I'm not going to bother with a full review here, because how do you review the 5th book of a series that encompasses as much as this one does? All I'll say is that if you've read this far, this book is a worthy pause. I hope Brandon Sanderson did a few victory laps after finishing this one, because he deserved it.