Review: When She Reigns

When She Reigns by Jodi Meadows
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Well, well, well. The finest series Jodi Meadows has yet written, and it's capped off in just as epic a fashion as I've come to expect after reading the stories of Mira and her dragons in The Fallen Isles Trilogy for two years now. After As She Ascends ended with the first of the seven Isles rising up in an unprecedented cataclysm - the Great Abandonment, with all the Idrisi survivors stuck as refugees, and no way to predict when any of the remaining Isles will suffer the same fate - now Mira and her allies have no choice but to potentially turn to the Algotti Emprie for help. It's a good thing that the Empire, established as they were as a Greater Scope Villain in Book 1, maybe weren't so evil as some true villains closer to home, villains with too much greed and not enough sense. But this book, it brings the series' environmental-justice themes full circle as we finally resolve all these years of conflict - though not without cost, of course. But while Game of Thrones disappointed in its eighth and final season, here, Mira shows us just how amazing a Khaleesi can truly be, caring for her dragons and her people in equal measure, and as much as her mental health problems can debilitate her, it doesn't cost her an ounce of heroism. Not when she has all the remedies at her disposal - her calming pills, her noorestones, and of course LaLa and Crystal, two of the cutest, most loyal dragons a girl could ask for. And let's not forget Aaru's love - seven gods, are he and Mira just the most shippable cuties or what? To The Fallen Isles Trilogy, I now bid ave atque vale, and I seriously can't wait to see just how amazing and imaginative Jodi Meadows gets in her next work!

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Review: The Tyrant's Tomb

The Tyrant's Tomb by Rick Riordan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Well, we've had well over a year to properly process all that happened in The Burning Maze, and now Uncle Rick returns with the penultimate part of Apollo's adventures in The Tyrant's Tomb. The stakes were already high enough in Book 3, with that huge and unexpected major character death, but here, Apollo himself is in greater danger than ever. Maybe if he weren't still stuck in a mortal body, things would be better - but when a cut from a particularly nasty Greek-mythological ghoul starts developing an infection that resists all attempts to cure it, Apollo's days are looking pretty numbered. And the most important number of all, of course, being 4/8 - the birthday assigned to Lester Papadopoulos as a clue that that's when the old Roman emperors are about to strike Camp Jupiter. Though life at Camp Jupiter is pretty shaken up by the loss of one of their own, they still are ready and willing to fight for their lives - and their glorious model of civilization, a new Rome so much more enlightened than the real one was - and who better to fight alongside Apollo than old faves like Hazel, Frank, and Reyna? Just one more book to go in this series, and I have no idea what Uncle Rick will do after that - just stick to being executive producer of the Rick Riordan Presents lineup? Maybe. But whatever he does is going to keep all the fans happy, I'm sure - and keep on earning him new ones.

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Review: Ninth House

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This latest from Leigh Bardugo, her first new adult book...well, really, can we call King of Scars an actual YA novel? No, honestly, we can't. But it's pretty clear that as dark as that book could have been, Bardugo was saving her darkest for the back half of this year, a book that's most certainly not PG-13 in its content. Beware all the trigger warnings - there's plenty of violence to be had in this book, of satanic, sexual, sanguine, and even shitty natures. Which makes it make sense that Stephen King and Joe Hill gave it their seals of approval.

Review: Amnesty

Amnesty by Lara Elena Donnelly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The funny thing about this series is that even though it takes place during times of great sociopolitical upheaval in its alternate world, Lara Elena Donnelly makes heavy use of time skips between the books so that all the stories emphasized in her writing are not those of war. Perhaps it's because there are simply so many World War II stories that even making a counterpart story would feel troped to death, somehow? Well, if there's one thing that Donnelly is not, it's troped to death. Not only because of her insistence on building her stories around the big wars in Amberlough and the rest of Gedda, not only because of her focus on the lives and experiences of LGBTQ+ and PoC characters, but also because of the great theme of this book. Even when evil is defeated, there is still work to be done to prevent it from coming back - a lesson that apparently not enough people have learned in the years since the real World War II, or the Civil Rights Movement, or other periods of strife that should've led to longer-lasting social change. To The Amberlough Dossier, I now bid ave atque vale, and wonder if perhaps someday Donnelly will come back to this world and tell those war stories after all.

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Review: Armistice

Armistice by Lara Elena Donnelly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Picking up three years after the events of Amberlough, the middle entry of the Dossier could fool you into believing that Gedda is still the center of this universe, the only place where any action happens. Well, nope. Not when this book largely takes place in Porachis, a distant land heavily inspired by India. Tropical locale, sticky history with Geddan colonization attempts (though not nearly as much as Liso, Porachis's allies), a unique writing system that Geddans have trouble reading, and of course a thriving film industry, in which Aristide has made a name for himself (and at some point lost that ridiculous affected stutter he had in the first book, symbolic of his fall from the social highs he occupied in Amberlough City.) Though quite some time has passed, we know that the Ospies aren't having an easy time of it, oppressing all of Gedda. Though even the resistance isn't as strong, as evidenced by Cordelia fleeing to Porachis to get help from Aristide and others. It's got a touch of middle-book syndrome, but I do appreciate Donnelly for taking this story in an altogether different direction than I expected given the way Amberlough progressed. One more novel in the trilogy, and I'll be reading and reviewing that one pretty quickly...

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Review: Amberlough

Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This trilogy, I've seen it often enough on the shelves at work that those pretty as hell covers made me really want to get into it. And so I've started my journey through a second-world fantasy built on the level of Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse, Fonda Lee's Green Bone Saga, R.F. Kuang's The Poppy War, or Avatar: The Last Airbender - paralleling the real world, historically and politically, but for sure not our world. The only difference between this and all the others I've mentioned before is that The Amberlough Dossier is devoid of magic or steampunk or any traditional fantasy elements - it's fantasy in a loose sense, being merely an alternate world where the technology and culture is ours from a bygone era, only with the names changed.

Review: Shatter City

Shatter City by Scott Westerfeld
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The sequel to Impostors brings us to the midpoint of Westerfeld's latest series in finer form than its predecessor in all the ways, and not just the fact that Shatter City is a significantly cooler title. There's also the ways in which this book finally starts growing into its own thing, distinct from all the other books in the Uglies-verse that came before it - and as on point as the social commentary of the original series is, Shatter City raises the stakes by introducing us to Paz, a city built on the ruins of Baja California where the population uses implants to regulate their emotions in such a way that it eerily comes off more like drug addiction than anything else. And as Frey and Col start to gain allies in this free city - a place where liberty is so prized - they both get to become even more badass than their Book 1 selves in all the ways, ready to wage war against certain warlike First Families willing to set the remains of the world on fire just to watch them burn. Even more so than in Impostors, Shatter City leaves me wondering so much what Westerfeld has in mind for the rest of the series - two books to go now!

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Review: The Fire Keeper

The Fire Keeper by J.C. Cervantes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The middle entry of J.C. Cervantes' planned Storm Runner trilogy sees Zane Obispo having to deal with a lot of unexpected ramifications from his first adventure. Not only having to live in isolation on a faraway island where shadow magic mucks with the WiFi, but the fact that by publishing his adventure in the world, even in a form where only the godborn (that is, we in the real world) can read the most salient details, has earned him a lot of negative attention from the Maya pantheon. Nice little touch of meta-humor there, Cervantes. But for this book, it's pretty appropriate that it's The Fire Keeper, because the action keeps the plot moving blazing fast and blisteringly hot. Only one more book left, and I'm pretty scared to see what kind of epic finale Cervantes gives us. Being that she's working under Rick Riordan's auspices, this is gonna get bloody even when it's bloody awesome...

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Review: The Girl Who Lived Twice

The Girl Who Lived Twice by David Lagercrantz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Millennium series is now officially doubled in length vs. how Stieg Larsson left it, and just like The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, David Lagercrantz gives us his third Lisbeth Salander story as a sort of soft ending - really, this could work just as well as Hornet's Nest as the series finale. Lagercrantz has said that this will be his last Lisbeth Salander novel, but if it's not, that'd be nice too, given the unexpected thrills and twists of The Girl Who Lived Twice. Finally picking up in earnest on the plot threads re: Camilla Salander that were left behind in The Girl in the Spider's Web, this latest novel once again puts some fictional Swedish political figures into the spotlight for crimes and scandals spanning continents - including some accidental death, possibly murder, during a climb of Mount Everest. It's just too bad that Lisbeth can't devote all her energies to unveiling these truths because she's still traveling the Continent, incommunicado, in search of the dreaded Camilla...but it's Lisbeth, of course she'll find a way to tie all the story threads together, as does Mikael Blomkvist. So while this might be the last book, or perhaps not, in any case I'm more than comfortable bidding Lisbeth ave atque vale once again. But even Lagercrantz himself said, "Never say never..."

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Review: These Divided Shores

These Divided Shores by Sara Raasch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How long was it gonna be until someone told me there was a title and cover for this sequel to These Rebel Waves?

And after that massive cliffhanger on the first book too!

I wanna see some major-league ass-kicking in this book, too. Reylo-grade ass-kicking. We all know Raasch can make it happen!



And guess what? Being Raasch, she delivers pretty well on this, the second half of her second series, and a pretty perfect piece of duology conclusion. All the lingering questions of These Rebel Waves are answered as the story comes full circle, and with a lot more world-building to go along with it. We don't really explore other nations beyond Grace Loray and Argrid very much, but the cosmopolitan nature of the island's society really comes into the spotlight, as we get a lot more little bits of culture from other places besides Gunnar's native Mechtlands. For instance, Emerdian masonry, capable of endlessly shifting, and therefore useful for the construction of seemingly inescapable prisons.

Of course, no prison-builder or hypocritical Inquisition-like theocratic assbutt king of Argrid could have seen the likes of Lu, Vex, and Ben coming.

500-plus pages fly pretty quickly in Raasch's latest, and as always, I'm begging for more from her. But for now, I'm bidding this series ave atque vale while eagerly awating her next work!

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Review: The Fated Sky

The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The sequel to this year's Hugo winner for Best Novel, The Fated Sky is, according to Mary Robinette Kowal, the second half of a duology - but it's not the end of the Lady Astronaut series, because Kowal has at least two more companion novels planned, at least one of which is meant to be roughly concurrent with this book in the timeline. The alternate timeline, now moved up to 1961 and beyond. Nearly a decade after the meteorite impact that kick-started this whole story in The Calculating Stars, Elma York and all her fellow Lady Astronauts are fighting for their rights and recognition against a backdrop of not only the Civil Rights Movement, but also an accelerated Space Race. In these new 1960s, there's already an Artemis Base on the Moon (tip of the cap to Andy Weir there?), but the fight for racial and gender equality continues to brew both on the Moon and on Earth, forcing all our favorite Lady Astronauts to constantly side-step interfering government trouts and separatist forces of varying stripes. There's even some subtle inclusion of LGBTQ+ issues as well - though Kowal acknowledges that one character, Kam, is transgender but hasn't quite figured himself out well enough to come out publicly, meaning that Elma, as narrator, unintentionally misgenders him through the entire novel. I think that might be the only real reason why I found myself taking off a star on this book - especially since such misgendering in the prerelease copy led to the delay of The Madness Blooms. Well, at the very least, Kowal acknowledges this breach of etiquette in the author's note, and I sincerely hope that she does better going forward. Because there's at least two more novels ahead, and I can't wait to read any of them!

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Review: The Merciful Crow

The Merciful Crow by Margaret Owen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first heard about Margaret Owen as an artist - more specifically, for her creations of the first official art of L.L. McKinney's Alice, and also one "whoops my hand slipped - A WHOLE BUNCH" sketch of Leia strangling Jabba the Hutt. Now, of course, she's got a book that's pretty well a work of art in and of itself, purely on the strength of its fantasy world-building. Comparable to Leigh Bardugo in its Russian-esque second-world style, The Merciful Crow is set in a world with no less than eleven different castes, all based on birds, all with different magical Birthrights - and while the plague-doctor Crows are the outcastes of this world, it's not the top-level Phoenixes you have to watch out for. It's the Swans, with their Birthright of Desire. It really doesn't get more clear a metaphor for the real world's race and class issues than this, and Owen's got me in for at least one more book - next year's The Faithless Hawk, for which I'm hoping it will not be another duology conclusion. This series is too well-developed for just two books!

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