Reviews and Comments

The Husbands is a light-hearted book whose core premise is a marriage-themed time loop/multiverse situation: whenever Lauren's husband goes into the attic, an entirely new husband comes down instead, and reality warps itself so that this is the husband she's always had. Shenanigans.

This goes in a lot of directions I enjoyed. It explores the "what if" feeling of imagining what different relationships and lives would like with different people in them. There's funny montages of "nope not this one, nor this one, nope nope nope". There's a hilarious "is this husband cheating on me" scene. There's an incredibly awkward "oh I have a different job and I have no idea how to do it or even who my boss is" moment. There's also the nature of understanding who you are by seeing the ways you do and do not change in different multiverse situations.

Some of the time loop-esque bits reminded me of playing the game In Stars and Time recently, in the feelings of impermanence and loneliness through living a life that you can't share or record. There's also questions of how responsible you are for the state of other people's lives when you have reality-changing powers.

(That said, there were also some dark moments that I found quite discomforting; when reality can only be reset by getting one specific person into one specific attic, Lauren goes to some awful places a couple of times, knowing that whatever she has done will be un-done.)

Despite being a book about a magical series of marriages, I wouldn't say this is a romance book. Lauren's major character trait (to me, at least) is that she is pretty accommodating and so the book's core arc here is her learning about herself and what her wants are, now that she has the power to make reality-changing choices.

Here's my favorite bits of Small Wonders Issue 7. I'm still slowly catching up on these from last year, but I'm glad to see this magazine got kickstarted for another year.

• The Mummy Gets Adopted by Amy Johnson

A poem about feline love and a mummy's chronic pain. Unsurprisingly, I feel really called to stories about chronically exhausted narrators (and wish I too could mummy curse anything that irritated me).

• All the Dead Girls, Singing by Avra Margariti

A fun story about death, hidden queer love, and the perception of being a "good girl".

The thing I enjoyed the most about the Saint of Bright Doors is the way my expectations were constantly dashed. The first line starts the book off feeling like a dark fantasy, as Fetter's shadow is stripped away from him. But from there he grows up some and moves to a city where there's all sorts of technology that make it feel like a parallel modern universe. But there's also subterfuge and revolution, group therapy for (non)-chosen ones, complicated family, and the mire of prison bureaucracy.

I think overall it's just different than a lot of books I've read, and I appreciate the myriad ideas it's trying to fit together. The pacing and narrative arc were not what I had expected, but somehow it was a delight all the same.

(One minor point that hit home is that this is in part a story of plagues and pogroms; and, horrifyingly that people have become so inured to them that they are "seasonal" and rich people take vacations to avoid them. I also appreciated the one-off detail of how shitty cops are at wearing masks properly.)

One last side note: I enjoyed screamsbeneath's review in general, but especially the mention of Vajra Chandrasekera's blog about Unbuddhism; it helped fix some of my ignorance of Sri Lanka to add context and depth to the book.

The Woods All Black is a queer and trans 1920's story about a nurse named Leslie being called out to help the small Appalachian town of Spar Creek. The initial foreground of trying to provide services to chilly and creepy Christian townsfolk is backgrounded by both gothic and body horror, as well as some romance.

One element of this book that I thought was done well is that it deals with Leslie's wartime trauma (and homophobia trauma). In this aspect, it echoes a lot of the things I liked about T. Kingfisher's What Feasts at Night, about somebody trying to understand what they can trust about their own perceptions in a strange and disturbing environment.

I love the queer solidarity in this book, about people trying to be themselves while being torn down by the airquotes community around them. The feeling of being somewhere unwelcoming and magnetically being pulled to befriend the one other outcast resonated particularly strongly for me.

I also appreciated reading a book taking on a historical trans perspective. Of course that's my language, and not the book's. Leslie calls himself an invert, and follows butch femme scripts that he learned in Paris, not having any other signposts to follow. Stevie is a local to Spar Creek that the locals read as a willful tomboy; he doesn't have the same language as Leslie, but still has a strong sense of his own identity. Mostly, I love that they each have things to teach the other about themselves.

The subtitle to this book is "When they call you a monster, show your teeth". It's got a delightfully sharp "be gay do crime" ring to it, but it's also an accurate depiction of the shape of its story and the revenge fantasy of fighting back against hatred by being the things they hate you for.

Wicked Problems is the second book in Max Gladstone's new Craft Wars trilogy. I enjoyed getting back to this world, but I feel like this book didn't work for me as much as I wanted it to.

Dead Country much more narrowly focuses on a local place and a smaller cast, in a way that really worked for me narratively. It's a book that I think you could easily read without having read any of the craft sequence and not feel lost. It's got a much tighter plot and stronger themes.

On the other hand, Wicked Problems feels like some Marvel extended universe take on the Craft Sequence, where pretty much everybody from every prior book in the previous series shows up to do their bit. Maybe some people really enjoy this kind of thing, but it's just not for me; it feels like this kind of media doesn't give characters (or the plot) enough space when everybody else is crowding them. I also would not at all recommend this book to people who hadn't read the entirety of the Craft Sequence.

To its credit, some of this character maximalism creates some fun moments! Temoc and the King in Red get a showdown redux; Kai flirts with Tara and dresses her in drag; everybody from the first two books get to reprocess their broken relationships; Seril and Kai gang up to take care of Tara who won't ask for help on her own. The final sequence is just really well done narratively as it (and everyone) all come together.

LM Sagas's Cascade Failure is a debut sf novel about found family on a scrappy spaceship working against the evils of capitalism. You love to see it. I don't know why this trope is such catnip for me, but I could really read so much of this.

It's full of snappy dialogue, fun relationships, and action-filled set pieces. Honestly, so much of the book felt visual that I could easily imagine a comic or film adaptation. The relationships between the characters, especially Jal and Saint, had a lot of depth.

I wish there was a little bit more heft to the worldbuilding. It's a space corporations vs unions situation (although it gets at some good nuance about how these can work too closely together), with a guild that sits sort of outside that. I didn't really get much sense of what guild hierarchy Captain Eoan existed in, as it seemed like they and the crew largely went off and did whatever they pleased.

Overall, my take is that this was fun but not amazing, and I'd read more by this author or in this universe for sure.

This book was fantastic. The setup is that shapeshifting, people-eating, amorphous blob Shesheshen is rescued by overly kind Homily, believing Shesheshen to be a person. Ironically, Homily comes from a monstrously toxic family of wyrm hunters, who are all out to kill Shesheshen specifically, while not realizing that Shesheshen is said monster. (Hijinks ensue.)

It's a story that deals with passing and masking--Shesheshen works really hard at trying to be a person, physically and socially assembled from what she can scavenge. She's got a wry non-human perspective that's especially biology-focused, like how to form legs and have a humanish shape, the tricky mechanics of eating with your mouth closed, and the overwhelmingness of smells and noises.

This book also deals with physically and emotionally abusive family, and how hard it is to struggle through trauma, no matter how much you are being hurt. Also, as you might expect, this book is also about family and royalty being the true monsters.

Normally, I am not keen on stories where a good bit of relationship tension comes from an intentional deception leading up to an eventual awkward reveal. Even if you ignore the self-protective reasons here, I think the setup in this book works partially for comedy reasons, as Shesheshen considers devouring Homily at the outset, but as she gets more entangled in Homily's family life, it also works as a deception told for protective reasons. It narratively worked for me enough to not be feeling "just tell her already!" throughout the book. The fact that there are a number of worse deceptions elsewhere also makes this feel more minor than you'd imagine it could be.

I devoured (pun not intended) the whole book in one day. Strong recommend from me.

This second book in the duology worked better narratively for me than the first, and I felt like it was more of a conclusion to everything the first set up. Structurally, the frame story and missing time (along Dikéogu's separation from Ejii) paid off for me narratively in how they created a lot of expectation holes to fill in later.

(A few extra spoilery thoughts here: https://books.theunseen.city/user/picklish/status/130577#anchor-130577)

I feel a little bit bad here because my overall conclusion for both of these books feels a bit like I kind of just "didn't get it", but maybe this is just an older work by an author whose newer work I've enjoyed quite a bit more.

The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles is the second book in the Mossa & Pleiti series, set on in a future steampunk Jupiter.

It may just be because I have read some great mysteries this year (hi, Tainted Cup!) and so I'm coming in with a high bar, but the mystery of this book feels quite thin. Compared to the last book, this mystery is more telegraphed for the reader to be able to solve it themselves; however, the mystery unspools slowly with little tension, Pleiti solves too many puzzles off page, and the final confrontation is underwhelming.

I think this sounds more negative than I feel about this book. I thought it was fun, I continued to really dig the worldbuilding and the setting, and it was cozy to get back into it; I think my expectations were high and the parts I enjoyed weren't quite enough to satisfy this time around.

I suggested this for #SFFBookClub, and so I gave this a reread so I could enjoy it again. I love the way this novel takes Hollywood and its obsession with stars and all of its racism and homophobia, and mixes it with fey magical realism. Overall, it's definitely a book whose strengths are in its setting and its writing, rather than in a tight plot, but I still love the characters.

In particular, probably my favorite part of this book are the constant turns of phrase that bring in fey elements at unexpected times. You're just reading along and then you get hit with a line like "The cameras were better now, I told myself. They had tamed them down, fed them better." Silent movies steal people's voices. Film stars are (ambiguously but also maybe literally) stars in the sky and wield their star power. Names are sacrificed, or hidden for protection. These pieces give the story some extra teeth and a darker edge of danger that always feels present at the margins. The extra ambiguity over what's real in a story about movie magic is delicious.

I have mixed feelings about parts of the end, especially with the trip to San Francisco. I think this is probably the part where the novel loses me a little bit. The pieces work well, but the pacing is a little jarring. It's nice to have a moment to come full circle to Luli's sister, the reveal of art outside of Hollywood that Luli has been too tunnel-visioned to see, and the continuing contrast of the realness of Tara and other places with the fey world of movies. I like the depth that this journey adds, and I'm not sure where else arguably in the novel that it would go.

"What so great about being seen?" Tara demanded. "What's so important about that?"

She might have had the words for it, but I didn't. They locked up in my throat, about being invisible, about being alien and foreign and strange even in the place where I was born, and about the immortality that wove through my parents' lives but ultimately would fail them. Their immortality belonged to other people, and I hated that.

One thing I saw in this reread was how much the book played with "being seen": fey bargains to get seen in pictures; pressure about being seen in "wrong" ways; being mis-seen as Mexican instead of Venezuelan; being asked to make do things to be seen as straight and married; the fear of being seen as crossing class lines or being seen as queer and butch.

Subtle Blood is the final book in this KJ Charles romance trilogy, and this one is my favorite of all three.

I appreciate that this book deals more with Will's emotional issues, and how easily understood his inability to do anything but take one day at a time is a wartime coping mechanism. In the previous books, Kim took up a lot of space with his own emotional friction within their relationship, and it's nice to see that once Kim is in a place where he can trust more, that it creates space for Will to grow as well. There's just some excellent conversations in this book.

I said after I finished the first book that I really hoped to get more into the mysteries of Kim's professional and personal life; satisfyingly, I feel like book two got into the details of the former and book three is very involved in the latter, and so this final book really added a nice sense of closure.

The Sugared Game is the second book in this 1920's queer post-war romance trilogy. It continues the very hot and cold relationship between Will and Kim amidst the background of the investigation of criminal enterprises. My own bias is a reader is that I feel like complicated relationships where people by turns treat each other poorly need sufficient explanation of the glue that keeps them still together. This book does a good job of continuing to develop rationale for why each of them still finds the other appealing and also why the things that don't work really don't work.

Thematically I appreciated that in this book both Will and Kim got what for in their "Kim-ish" behaviors. In particular, there's a number of incidents where Will unconsciously ends up behaving like Kim, using others for his own ends and keeping secrets to protect others, and there's emotional repercussions for these choices. In some ways though, I feel like this helped create more understanding of Kim as well, to more directly see him through the parallels of Will's actions and to see the way that Will is indirectly influenced by him.

I appreciated that this book had even more Phoebe and Maisie, who are both delightful characters. I also said after the first book that I was hoping to learn more about Kim's past to understand him better, and this book definitely dug into some of his professional secrets (and the third book looks like it might get into more family things, based on its blurb).

I read this book for #QueerRomanceClub. It's a post-war 1920's queer romance with a bit of a mystery element to it.

This was a fun read, but the relationship between Kim and Will was definitely a little uncomfortable in parts for me, and perhaps not quite my cuppa. I think I was not expecting something so hot and cold and hot and cold with such (understandable)! trust issues. Without the meta-knowledge that this is a trilogy with these two as leads, I as the reader would have trusted Kim even less than I did.

That said, I appreciated the complication of their messy relationship; I feel like the book sold it well both why and what worked (and didn't). Given that these books are from Will's perspective and Kim is the one who keeps secrets and lies, my hope for the future is that we as readers get to see more into Kim's professional and personal life and understand better the choices he makes.

On the surface, this is a future sf book about discovering sentient octopuses and trying to communicate with them. But, this is no Children of Ruin or even a Feed Them Silence; it hinges less on plot and characters, and feels more about worldbuilding in service to philosophy.

I quite enjoyed this book, and the strongest part was just how tightly the book's themes and ideas intertwined through the book's different point of views and the worldbuilding. It's a not-so-far future book with sentient octopuses, overfished waters, AI boats that drive themselves in search of profit, drones driven by humans in tanks, and the first android (but one reviled by humanity). It's a book about language and communication, memory and forgetting, what it means to be human and exist in community, and about fear of others.

A classic Scalzi one-shot novel--a fluffy snack with some good twists.

The basic setup is that down-on-his-luck Charlie Fitzer unexpectedly inherits his estranged billionaire uncle's villainous empire and now has to fend with other villains who were pissed at his uncle.

Key features:

• volcano lair
• jerk dolphins who want to unionize
• zoom call power plays