Review: The Iron Vow

The Iron Vow by Julie Kagawa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For the third time, Julie Kagawa brings her longest running saga, the world of The Iron Fey, to an end...or does she? Well, even if the ending stays just a bit open, it definitely has an air of finally wrapping things up on this particular story world. Since each book in the Evenfall trilogy thus far has had a different primary POV character - first Puck, then Ash - this time, we have Meghan as the primary POV character, coming full circle from the original trilogy which was all her story. It takes a little while for this book to reach the ending it's got in store, but daaaaaaaamn is that a harsh tear jerker of an ending, especially for a series that has run so long on its complex characters in need of redemption. So, to The Iron Fey for now and Evenfall for sure, I now bid ave atque vale and hope to see more awesome work from Kagawa soon. Though I should definitely check out her Shinji Takahashi series at some point too, I've been forgetting it for a while...

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Review: Stars and Smoke

Stars and Smoke by Marie Lu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s rare, I think, that I read a book by one of the best and most under appreciated writers in the business, Marie Lu, and I’m not super jazzed about what I’ve read. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Lu is still one of the best in the business for a verifiable ton of reasons, including her ability to write books that demand to be read in one sitting (as my old reviews of the Warcross duology can attest.) Stars and Smoke is, thankfully, no exception to that rule.

Review: Last Violent Call

Last Violent Call by Chloe Gong
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bridging the gap between the two duologies of Secret Shanghai, as well as the gap between the two books of the second duology, is this collection of two beautifully bound novellas from Chloe Gong, sold in a lovely box set that apparently is too tall for the shelves at Barnes & Noble (at least, the newly opened and oddly very small store at Cascade Station in Portland.) The two stories focus on a pair of couples who've had to go into hiding since the events of the first duology - one, Roma and Juliette, hiding in a smaller town many miles away from Shanghai and yet unable to quite escape the underworld, or their family; and the other, Benedikt and Marshall, getting to play Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express. Both stories were pretty bite sized, but gripping as Gong's work always is - and more than ever, the humor really shines front and center, with Roma and Juliette having long since earned their right to be as cutesy lovey dovey as they can, and Benedikt and Marshall being sassy as hell and yet still having to hide the fact that they're a couple, even if they're officially married by someone of some certain ordination. It's very nice to have this to tide readers over until Foul Heart Huntsman comes out this fall, but with this, that, and Immortal Designs in July, it truly is the year of Chloe Gong and all her haters can just sit there and be wrong, as always.

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Review: Rust in the Root

Rust in the Root by Justina Ireland
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Though it’s not a spin-off of her signature alternate historical horror series Dread Nation, Justina Ireland says in the acknowledgements for this standalone novel that her research for those two books led her to a digitized Library of Congress archive of photos of Black Americans in the Depression era, which helped catalyze her into writing this novel. These photos are featured between chapters, much like Miss Peregrine, though Ireland isn’t picking pictures out for scare factor like Ransom Riggs used to do. The pictures help inform a new alternate history where it’s kinda sorta like the Dust Bowl, except Blights of bad magic have caused widespread displacement of people, especially poor people and Black people already systemically suffering. Unsurprisingly, Ireland makes it a point of emphasizing how much a lot of in universe problems are the result of white people exploiting Black people for centuries. I’ll be honest, though, given that Ireland’s got a documented tendency to ignore issues faced by other races (like that time when she flippantly tweeted how Asians didn’t count as people of color, or the time she accused a Native reader of anti Blackness for critiquing Dread Nation in great detail, all of which are long gone from her constantly auto purging Twitter feed by now), I do feel like she’s more than a bit of a hypocrite. I’ll admit, that made me more than hesitant to read this book, but I did read to the end. I’m sorry to say, though, for all her inventiveness with history, Ireland doesn’t do as well with writing a coherent story this time around, and the characters and their relationships are largely quite forgettable, lacking (except in faint glimmers) the usual snarky sparks Ireland infuses into her protagonists. Oh well, guess this one just wasn’t for me.

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Review: Bonds of Brass

Bonds of Brass by Emily Skrutskie
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ll be honest, this is a generous two star review. I vaguely remember when this book first came out and there was some buzz because it was kinda sorta basically a FinnPoe fanfic when everyone from Oscar Isaac on down was salty at Disney for not giving that m/m ship the time to sail. In practice, while the book does draw pretty heavily on the instant bromantic humor and chemistry of Finn and Poe’s copiloting adventure out of Kylo Ren’s flagship (I admit, I shipped StormPilot too at first, but I’ve come to see them as more platonic than romantic, even if I still also headcanon Poe as bi), it doesn’t do a great job of letting that humor just run with the story. No, it tries too hard to be about some serious star crossed lovers (Ettian being from a subjugated empire and therefore a rebel against the Big Bad Empire to which Gal is heir), with politics that read pretty uncomfortably given that Gal’s people have oppressed Ettian’s…it’s like the book doesn’t quite know which story it wants to tell. At least it settles into that pattern by the end, though I still found the ending shocking more for eye rolling reasons than anything else. So at this point, I’m giving up on this series, and from what I read of the spoilers, I think I made the right call. As for FinnPoe vibes, I’ll always recommend M.K. England’s The Disasters instead.

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Review: Song of Silver, Flame Like Night

Song of Silver, Flame Like Night by Amélie Wen Zhao
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s good to see that far from the attempt to cancel Zhao before she even got published in 2019, she’s already got one completed trilogy under her belt, and this promising start to a new series that’s very well rooted in the stories of her ancestral land. Picture, for this book, an alternate China where European-coded colonists have taken over sometime paralleling the 20th century, but there still lies an ancient and cosmic magic, yīn and yáng, the Crimson Phoenix and Silver Dragon and Azure Tiger and Black Tortoise all waiting for practitioners of banned magic to take back their homeland. And while this book is pretty long and slow moving at times, it wouldn’t be Zhao without a weapons grade cliffhanger or two at the end, including one particularly “oh my God no what is Zhao doing to these poor protagonists?!?” moment, for which this book absolutely earns a 3.5 rounded up to 4 from me.

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Review: Winston Chu vs. the Whimsies

Winston Chu vs. the Whimsies by Stacey Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I haven't been keeping up so well with the Rick Riordan Presents lineup of late, but when Stacey Lee puts out a book that's so different from all her others - middle grade with a boy protagonist in modern day San Francisco - you know I have to stop and read it. And when Lee weaves in Chinese creation myths which I remember from the books I used to assign students at the tutoring center where I worked in the Bay Area for six years, with more than a touch of Gremlins-grade mayhem - no, seriously, somewhere in the book there's a joke about not feeding after midnight - you know I really have to stop and read it. Though this book doesn't end with the name of a sequel, there really better be one, because there's no way Lee's going to end it all like that. Not when there's so much more bizarre adventure to be had just around the corner...

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