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When it was still active and nimble, it was a house of horrors from whose impenetrable womb wave after wave of bladed robots would emerge, whipping through the air, keen to slice and beep and blow.
— Luminous by Silvia Park
That summer was immortal.
— Luminous by Silvia Park
Three women in three different eras encounter danger and witchcraft in this eerie multigenerational horror …
This was on the #SFFBookClub poll but never got picked.
The Bewitching is three intertwined stories that all revolve around witchcraft. In 1998, struggling grad student Minerva is researching Beatrice Tremblay who wrote a novel the Vanishing roughly based on the disappearance of her friend Virginia. The second thread is that Minerva gets a chance to read Beatrice's journals, and so we hear Beatrice's perspective of mysterious and traumatic events of 1934. The final thread is Minerva's great-grandmother Alba who tells Minerva a story on her deathbed about events from her childhood in 1908.
At night the three of them talked on ICQ about meaningless and profound topics.
I am a sucker for parallel stories, but I especially love how rooted each of these different narratives are in highly specific times and places.
As a horror story, the pacing reminded me a lot of …
This was on the #SFFBookClub poll but never got picked.
The Bewitching is three intertwined stories that all revolve around witchcraft. In 1998, struggling grad student Minerva is researching Beatrice Tremblay who wrote a novel the Vanishing roughly based on the disappearance of her friend Virginia. The second thread is that Minerva gets a chance to read Beatrice's journals, and so we hear Beatrice's perspective of mysterious and traumatic events of 1934. The final thread is Minerva's great-grandmother Alba who tells Minerva a story on her deathbed about events from her childhood in 1908.
At night the three of them talked on ICQ about meaningless and profound topics.
I am a sucker for parallel stories, but I especially love how rooted each of these different narratives are in highly specific times and places.
As a horror story, the pacing reminded me a lot of her previous book Mexican Gothic. There's a slow foreshadowing of creeping horror where things are going slightly awry (or maybe it's coincidence). And then, very late, there is a mask off moment where it's explicit what is happening. Having three intertwined stories that each have their own arc of tension only makes this stronger.
Content warning the navigating fox plot discussion / spoilers
@Tak@gush.taks.garden Reading between the lines, my conclusions were: Quintus was (probably) made by Toosa who taught Quintus about the roads, since multiverse Toosa is there right at Quintus's first moments of self-consciousness. I think it's possible that Quintus was traveling the roads prior to meeting Toosa as well. Toosa also made Cynthia promise to save Quintus (which happens off-page, right?), which also makes me feel like Toosa was in the know about the future (which lines up with the old/young Toosa appearance earlier). Maybe I'd guess that the "why" of Quintus was something around sabotaging the resurrection plan to thwart the incursion of the empire somewhat? That's what I got.
Quintus Shu'al is the world's only navigating fox. He's also in disgrace after leading an …
Content warning the navigating fox plot discussion / spoilers
I respect that so many things were left ambiguous: Quintus's origin, what's happening with the Empress, how did Quintus and Cynthia's crew come to their understanding, etc. - but maybe some of them could have been resolved? just one?
Quintus Shu'al is the world's only navigating fox. He's also in disgrace after leading an …
Whew, the ending felt so sudden I think I hurt something.
The Navigating Fox is like a thousand-page fantasy epic crammed into 150 pages. It's super well written, and the setting is great and I want more, particularly the Northern Membership - although I could stand to go a few days without reading the word "knowledgeable". Now give me the thousand-page edition. 😀
Whew, the ending felt so sudden I think I hurt something.
The Navigating Fox is like a thousand-page fantasy epic crammed into 150 pages. It's super well written, and the setting is great and I want more, particularly the Northern Membership - although I could stand to go a few days without reading the word "knowledgeable". Now give me the thousand-page edition. 😀
Even more sweeping and heart-wrenching than its 2015 prequel, The Monster Baru Cormorant is the …
She was not thinking like an Oriati, the people who for decades had been tricked and exploited by the Masquerade. What could you do to resist that trickery? You could stop acting in what seemed to be your own calculated self-interest. You could avoid doing what was necessary, because then Falcrest could manipulate you by changing the terms of necessity. You could focus, instead, on basic goodness, an inflexible moral code: be honest, be kind, be charitable. Was goodness still good if you hewed to it out of tactical necessity? Was there, Baru wondered, any difference between being good and pretending to be good for your own gain, if you took the same actions in the end? Was there any difference between telling the truth unconditionally, and deploying the truth in service of your agenda, if you told the same truth? Maybe the Oriati thought so. Maybe the difference between truth-for-itself and tactical truth was the only difference that mattered. Maybe the most crucial and subtle distinction in life was the difference between someone who was truly good and someone playing at goodness to gain power. Could she distinguish those two tendencies in herself?
— The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (The Masquerade, #2)
(Oriati are peaceful people with a thousand year history and a much larger population. Falcrest/the Masquerade is the up-and-coming, aggressive empire. East/southeast/south(?) asia history inspired setting.)
This series has its flaws, but I really like what it teaches about imperial conquest. And it's riveting.
(Oriati are peaceful people with a thousand year history and a much larger population. Falcrest/the Masquerade is the up-and-coming, aggressive empire. East/southeast/south(?) asia history inspired setting.)
This series has its flaws, but I really like what it teaches about imperial conquest. And it's riveting.
Quintus Shu'al is the world's only navigating fox. He's also in disgrace after leading an …
"I am curious as to how one ends a concept," she replied.
Scipio Aemilanus was standing next to the little fire of dried dung some humans of the Membership had built. Shadows and light played across his features.
"By force," he said.
Quintus Shu'al is the world's only navigating fox. He's also in disgrace after leading an …
The Navigating Fox is a novella that feels like a piece of a larger novel that's been extracted, loose threads and all. Or, maybe it's just uninterested in filling in all the details and giving explicit answers. I wish this story had been a novel to give it space to stretch its wings.
The best part of this book is all of the worldbuilding details. I love the idea of animals that have been given voices and are now knowledgeable (and self-conscious). I love the various societies and their interactions with an overseas empire that has started extending into the land of this novella. I loved the ideas of how a society that treats animals as people would need to operate. There's just so much going on here in the margins of this book over a core parallel telling of two journeys.
One thing my partner always says …
The Navigating Fox is a novella that feels like a piece of a larger novel that's been extracted, loose threads and all. Or, maybe it's just uninterested in filling in all the details and giving explicit answers. I wish this story had been a novel to give it space to stretch its wings.
The best part of this book is all of the worldbuilding details. I love the idea of animals that have been given voices and are now knowledgeable (and self-conscious). I love the various societies and their interactions with an overseas empire that has started extending into the land of this novella. I loved the ideas of how a society that treats animals as people would need to operate. There's just so much going on here in the margins of this book over a core parallel telling of two journeys.
One thing my partner always says about writing is that he doesn't need every detail spelled out, but he has to believe that the author knows these things. This is all to say that this not a book to read for a strong sense of closure, even if you can read between some lines. It feels coherent overall to me, but with a lot more loose threads than I had expected going in.
Quintus Shu'al is the world's only navigating fox. He's also in disgrace after leading an …
A faraway look came to the wiry man's eyes. "My most important role, good navigator, is to march to the entryway to the underworld, close the gates of Hell, and end death forever."
So, this time, he was to accompany me. This time he wanted me to take him to Hell.
Quintus Shu'al is the world's only navigating fox. He's also in disgrace after leading an …
"And where did Quintus Shu'al come from? Of all the foxes in the known world, he alone is knowledgeable? He could not have been born knowledgeable. So, someone gave him voice! But he has always refused to answer questions as regard to his origins!"
A young girl's disastrous first foray through the multiverse cleaves her from her family and …
There's a lot of neat things going on in this book, but there's also a number of things that didn't quite land for me. I'm struggling to have a solid opinion, so here's a mishmash of drive-by thoughts.
I do love this book's thematic mantra of fixing broken things. It's clear that many characters in this book are broken (emotionally), and it's clear that the Boston timeline is broken (structurally, via capitalism largely), but it's less clear to me what sort of fixing is truly going on, especially in a multiverse sense.
Obviously Martin, Stirling, and Melissa are putting in work for their community, but the rest of it just seems like talk (or something a future book in the series will get to). I wish there was more clarity about how Jace had broken his oath to repair the broken parts of the universe, and what that …
There's a lot of neat things going on in this book, but there's also a number of things that didn't quite land for me. I'm struggling to have a solid opinion, so here's a mishmash of drive-by thoughts.
I do love this book's thematic mantra of fixing broken things. It's clear that many characters in this book are broken (emotionally), and it's clear that the Boston timeline is broken (structurally, via capitalism largely), but it's less clear to me what sort of fixing is truly going on, especially in a multiverse sense.
Obviously Martin, Stirling, and Melissa are putting in work for their community, but the rest of it just seems like talk (or something a future book in the series will get to). I wish there was more clarity about how Jace had broken his oath to repair the broken parts of the universe, and what that oath actually means to Jace and Corinne. (Has Harnett sworn this same oath? Also, what is this oath as compared to the Network's "greatest good" motto??)
I think the pacing of the end of the book is also a little harmed by this being part of a series. There's clearly a climactic confrontation, but it largely feels unresolved, leaving lots of pieces for the future.
This sounds like a lot of complaints, but I enjoyed my read here. I do love a telepathic dog. I love the idea of talking to a therapist about portals to other worlds. I love Jace and Corinne working together for a shared goal while also being so misaligned. I love Martin still working to care for Reina even when Reina is not his sister. Overall, my favorite part of this book was all of the characters.
(This was the #SFFBookClub book for March 2026.)
A young girl's disastrous first foray through the multiverse cleaves her from her family and …
I really enjoyed the setting, and particularly the humanization of the unhoused characters. I do feel a little like… not much happened, plot-wise, and the cutoff for the next installment felt very abrupt to me.
The next novella in the New York Times bestselling Sworn Soldier series, featuring Alex Easton …
Fun, short, quotable.
The first book in this series was a riff on the Fall of the House of Usher (that we read for #SFFBookClub), and the second book intersected quite well with Easton's war trauma. This third book reads like a monster of the week but without much else going on in terms of themes or character development. A good snack of a romp, but not very filling.
(Also, shaking my head that there's no Eugenia Potter in this one either. It does at least have Gallacian rock pronouns going for it though.)
Fun, short, quotable.
The first book in this series was a riff on the Fall of the House of Usher (that we read for #SFFBookClub), and the second book intersected quite well with Easton's war trauma. This third book reads like a monster of the week but without much else going on in terms of themes or character development. A good snack of a romp, but not very filling.
(Also, shaking my head that there's no Eugenia Potter in this one either. It does at least have Gallacian rock pronouns going for it though.)
A young girl's disastrous first foray through the multiverse cleaves her from her family and …
This air had winter’s bite, even though at home they had not even hit the autumn solstice.
— Litany for a Broken World by Karen Conlin, L. J. Cohen, Chris Howard (Entangled Realities, #1)
not sure if mistake or worldbuilding
