Review: Peace Talks

Peace Talks by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ahhhhhhhh. Six years since the last Dresden Files book, and look, Jim Butcher's finally got us fans really truly well fed with the promise of two full-length novels this year alone. Also, the promise of both of them being a pretty full-fledged duology within the series' greater scope - aptly titled with opposing names too, Peace Talks and Battle Ground. So yeah, let's be real, this book is setting up a lot of nasty, nasty crap to be resolved in its immediate successor, but fear not - Butcher's giving us the next book only two months after this one came out, perhaps to make up for the extremely long absence he's had since Skin Game. (To say nothing of the even longer wait we've had since the first book of The Cinder Spires - but hey, at least this isn't a Patrick Rothfuss or a George R.R. Martin situation going on here.) While it's pretty clear that this book is a Prolonged Prologue to Battle Ground, though...what's no laughing matter is the cliffhanger this one ends on. Damn, but that one hurt, right in the gut, Harry.

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Review: Harrow the Ninth

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tamsyn Muir got off to a pretty kickass start with her complex, obscenely disturbingly cool Gideon the Ninth, but after the horrifying twist ending to that one, where could she go next? Why, into even deeper levels of instability, of course. Harrow the Ninth now gets into the head of the young princess of the Ninth House, now one of the Emperor's new Lyctors, but the ending of the first book has left her with a pretty serious mental split. In addition to half the book being told in a peculiar second-person perspective (like Muir got possessed by the spirit of N.K. Jemisin), we get a good three or four fifths of the book kinda lowkey pretending like that big twist from Book 1 didn't happen. But then right around pages 350-400 or so, the veil falls away, and we finally get a ton of answers and even more unexpected and scary twists, murders on top of murders and truths on top of truths...holy Necrolord Prime, Batman! Only one more to go in this trilogy, which of course I'll be autobuying next year. I hope...

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Review: Felix Ever After

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: transphobia, allusions to homophobia, allusions to deadnaming, assorted bullying, catfishing.

There's a lot of YA contemporaries in recent years that I'll give a 3.5 and either round up or down. This one, I'll round up because of how much Felix Love, as a Black, queer, trans teen, needs the love. Yeah, I know, bad pun, bad Ricky...but I'm sure Felix would approve.

Review: Something to Say

Something to Say by Lisa Moore Ramee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Much like her debut novel, last year's A Good Kind of Trouble, Lisa Moore Ramee's Something to Say is a pretty sweet, and pretty important, MG contemporary with lots of on-point commentary about social justice. Especially in a year when Black Lives Matter, and protests of the kind seen in Ramee's first book, have come into sharper cultural focus than ever before - and, pretty presciently, this book deals with the potential renaming of a public SoCal institution away from John Wayne, since I'm pretty sure I saw a recent news headline about a petition to rename the airport in Orange County after his infamous pro-white supremacy quotes from the 70s resurfaced for at least the third time in as many years.

Review: The ​Crow Rider

The ​Crow Rider by Kalyn Josephson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Last year, I was lucky enough to get an ARC of The Storm Crow, and now I get to complete Kalyn Josephson's debut duology - which, while (I know it's a bit wearing of me to say) I still don't understand why duologies have become such a thing in YA, especially, it's a pretty well-done conclusion here in The Crow Rider. (Though let's be real, that crow on the cover looks stressed as hell, though it also reminds me a bit of a character my friend Koda created recently...hmm...) But anyway. As YA fantasy goes, this series does a damned good job of exploring resistance to a nefarious colonial power, with a lot of twists piled up on top of it so such a topical storyline doesn't just play out in the simplest of terms either. Though the first half of the book moves pretty slowly, the second half loads in all the high action and amazement that makes this duology worth recommending. So with that, I hereby declare ave atque vale to this series, and wait with bated breath for Kalyn Josephson's next work...

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Review: The Empire of Gold

The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm so glad that this is one of a small handful of books I've been able to acquire in physical form since California got locked down - and that I found my way to the right place to get a signed first edition from Chakraborty herself, courtesy of Interabang Books in Dallas. The Empire of Gold, a green and gold brick of paper clocking in at over 750 pages, wraps up the trilogy in such amazing fashion that I'm glad I took my sweet time savoring it a little more strongly than I even did for the first two books the first times I read those.

Review: Clap When You Land

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: parental death, stalking, sexual assault.

Elizabeth Acevedo returns to the novel-in-verse style that helped her debut so amazingly in The Poet X and once again brings us a literary experience unlike any other. This time, she splits the book between the POVs of two Dominican girls - Yahaira, living in NYC, and Camino, living on the island - and how their lives unexpectedly intertwine in the wake of a DR-bound plane crashing after leaving New York.