#sffbookclub

This was a fun novella about 17th century London midwifery where there's a spate of babies being born with monstrous appearances and magical abilities. This is the September 2025 #SFFBookClub pick.

There's a fun angle of respectability politics, of not wanting to be publicly seen as queer so that Sarah can get better midwife clientele (and survive as a widowed woman), but also taking the angle of her having to cover the parts of herself that are uncanny. (Sure, sure, I am a sucker for the metaphor of queer as monstrous.) There's also a strong gendered metaphor of Sir Christopher Wren, creepily representing science and men cataloguing the world (and thinking they truly know it) versus the midwives having their own knowledge of other worlds and of magic.

Overall, this book met my expectations for exactly what I thought it was going to be in a good way. I love a solid novella that can fit in good worldbuilding and plot and some character development without leaving me feeling like there's elements missing or it's rushed. It feels like the kind of story that would make a good movie. (This is all especially in comparison to previous novellas we have read for #SFFBookClub, like Countess.)

I have some thoughts about the ending, which I will put in a separate spoilered post.

This is one of a few books we've read for #SFFBookClub that consists of a series of ostensibly separate stories which collectively build one world. I loved the quietly unsettling mood of a lot of the stories, and actually enjoyed how much the author keeps the reader guessing until about half way through the book. But the two stories--one about halfway through, one near the end--which do the most explicit explaining ended up doing too much of that for my taste. I think a certain amount of tying things together was needed, but making things too neat was a bit of a loss, and the big picture story doesn't work as well for me as all the facets in the individual chapters.

I had a lot of fun tearing through this book. At first I felt like it was a bit too directly "colonised Philippines but with magic" to be interesting fantasy, but in the end Buba used the magical elements to really bring out the clash of two religions and cultures in a powerful, interesting way.

#SFFBookClub

#SFFBookClub September, which I'll pick up after finishing outside.ofa.dog/book/178751/s/i-am-the-dark-that-answers-when-you-call because it took me longer to get hold of a copy of this one.

Incredible.

We've read a number of books for #SFFBookClub that have a short story structure with interconnecting themes and worldbuilding (How High We Go in the Dark, and Under the Eye of the Big Bird) but In Universes is my clear favorite among all of these.

Structurally, this book is a series of short stories with a single point of view. Each story takes place in different adjacent-ish branching multiverses, some of which veer into more magical realism and externalized metaphors while others are more realistic. Thematically, this book is about dealing with internalized homophobia, trauma, depression and grief. But it's also about (queer) possibility and transformation and acceptance.

It's interesting to me just how many things I underlined (virtually) while reading this book. Delicious turns of phrase. Devastating sentences seemingly directly targeted at my feelings. Interconnecting thematic ideas everywhere. I found myself utterly engaged in its writing and imagery.

What is most striking about In Universes is that even when some chapters veer off in fantastical directions ("my mother is a horde of bees", "I am pregnant with an octopus", horse telepathy), there is such a coherent emotional progression for Raffi across the entire book. A lot of similarly structured books suffer from meandering too far afield with their ideas that they fail to come together, but In Universes feels so intentional with how it deploys its imagery and pacing. If anything, the final part of the book, consisting of a single chapter, resonates the strongest of all of them and I love the way it reprises the previous stories to bring everything together.

#SFFBookClub read for August 2025.

This is not a book I think I would have picked out for myself outside of the book club, but I found it to be a surprisingly good read. It was a little hard to see the overall picture at first due to each chapter occurring with completely different characters and situations. It made it difficult to track when you would see the names of previous characters brought up in later chapters.

Everything kind of came together in the end and for me, and even the disjointed stories made sense. For me, at least. I'm not sure if this is one that I would regularly recommend to others due to the overall vibes. I don't know a lot of people that really enjoy Japanese dystopian stories with this structure.

This felt to me like a much more surreal variant of North Continent Ribbon. Each story/chapter was a continuation or a tangent of a previous one, but I don't feel like the whole contributed much to a more coherent understanding of the whole picture. Overall, the vibe was very vague, and I'm not sure how much I took away from the experience.

#SFFBookClub

This was the #SFFBookClub book for August 2025.

In some ways, this book structurally reminded me of How High We Go in the Dark; they're both a post-apocalyptic, interconnected series of stories about humanity trying to survive. The stories here are further in the future and feel much more surreal and dreamlike. If anything, I feel like I've missed something critical as a reader--I can't quite put my finger on what this book is trying to do.

There are a few things that don't work for me. I think the stories largely don't stand on their own: there's many interesting ideas, but they don't feel connected via plot or resonate with a theme. There's also a penultimate chapter of the book where the book just out and out tells you everything it's been hinting at previously. I had guessed at a good bit of it, but it felt underwhelming to have it laid out so plainly rather than sketched across stories.

I don’t hate you. I hate that I don’t have better answers to all that’s wrong in my city. The only choices shouldn’t be bloody vengeance or doing nothing. I hate that the Codicíans’ ‘gift’ of empire is generations of trauma.

Overall, I think I'm a bit mixed on this book. I was most intrigued in the messy middle, where all of the characters are caught between competing and interesting tensions. It felt impossible for any character to do right by another while being caught in such structural traps. The focus of the book also (surprisingly?) felt firmly on these relationships between people who care about each other, and the messed up ways that colonialism warps their love.

I also quite enjoyed a character whose magic is tied to her emotions, and so she quite literally has to repress her anger and sadness in order to survive and hide.

It's also certainly a rare book where the straight relationship felt more interesting than the queer one, but maybe I just don't have much patience for religious "I can save her!!!" self-hatred stories.

#SFFBookClub