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This T. Kingfisher book is a regency-esque novel about an abusive sorceress trying to magically worm her way into a marriage for money with her terrified daughter in tow.

The setting feels like regency mixed with fantasy, but also where all the identifying details of either genre have been blurred out. There's sorcery, social classes, and concerns about money and inheritance. However, there's no specific sense of place here in either a regency or fantasy genre here, and instead the novel comes off as a character-focused comedy of manners and dark fantasy/horror mashup.

As with most T. Kingfisher books, I adored the characters and the character dynamics and that carried a lot of story for me. Maybe this is too personal, but some of the abusive dynamics hit a little too close to home for me (especially the bits around doors and privacy), but it made Cordelia finding safety and trust again all the stronger.

I heard about The Mushroom at the End of the World from this Sophie from Mars video called "The World Is Not Ending", which talks quite a bit about mushrooms, and doomerism, and quotes frequently from this book.

I don't read a lot of non-fiction, but this book quite deliberately and explicitly structures itself in a rambling manner, interspersing history and anecdotes, with tangents galore. Rather than some formal thesis and organized argument, this book paints a series of encounters with matsutake mushrooms in varying contexts and perspectives, with a thematic framing.

If I had to sum it up, the book posits that progress (and even hope) are part of capitalism and its need to scale and organize and alienate; if we are to thrive in the decline of capitalism, then we need different tools that often fall in its margins: noticing, unpredictable encounters, new relationships, and more mutualism.

I also enjoyed this review which gets at all of this much better than I can.

Set on a near-future artificial island in the arctic, this book focuses on the interplay of two characters and their worlds: Antonio, a survivor of raider attacks turned artist in residence for rich traders of extraterrestrial microorganisms, and Par Augustus, a personal assistant program that has spontaneously and secretly become sentient, and comes into the keeping of Antonio.

This book goes into a lot of different directions: the relationship between humans and machines, arguments about the nature of art and artists, utopias both human and machine, the lure of authoritarianism, and a critique of attempting to be neutral. I really enjoyed the complicated relationship of Antonio and Par as it developed over time, and the interactions of the machines with each other.

A few touchpoints in this book that reminded me of other things I've read: The tone is quite different, but the way this book talks about the dual world of machines and humans reminded me a lot of Suzanne Palmer's short story The Secret Life of Bots. The way that machines coordinate things magically for Antonio feel like parts of Person of Interest, although Par feels like it has more of an agenda. This book also has machines trying to work around Asimovian robot laws. Finally, the neutral Thulians also remind me a lot of the Vorkosigan Saga's Beta Colony, where they both force people into coercive therapy and counseling when their views are misaligned.

Lady Eve's Last Con is a sapphic con artist story set on a 1920's retrofuture satellite. I think my favorite part of the book is all of the conflicting threads pulling on Ruth. She's trying to pull a revenge con on her sister Jules's ex-boyfriend Esteban in order to get his money for their secret child. (She hasn't told her sister about this.) And, even if Esteban is blinded by a rebound, Esteban's sister Sol quickly is on to Ruth's schemes, and Ruth can't seem to help continuing to get involved with Sol's distractions (and Sol's own secrets). Oh, and there's also the interplanetary mob too. Overall, it was a lot of fun and the conclusion managed to tie off all the threads really satisfyingly.

My one gripe is that Esteban Mendez-Yuki is entirely boring (albeit possibly just through Ruth's eyes). He immediately falls for Ruth and never sees through her boredom. The only reason we see that Esteban would care for Ruth at all is that she looks like her sister Jules and it's implied that he's on a massive rebound. This book focuses on Ruth and Sol and not really at all about Esteban, so this is somewhat understandable--I just think he would have felt less like a cardboard cutout if we could have known more about his emotional interior.

This is easily my favorite book in the Singing Hills cycle. Cleric Chih goes back home to Singing Hills abbey, and the reader finally gets to see it in person with all of its neixin and politics. There's something about having this book set in Singing Hills that makes it a lot more grounded than the other one-off travel pieces. I love Chih coming back to their friend Ru, now acting Divine of the abbey, and having to renegotiate what their friendship looks like after so much time and change on both of their parts.

But, it's also a book about grief and transformation and the way we know others through stories. I love how the theme of change weaves throughout--it makes an ending that could have felt too pat instead resonate in a thematically satisfying way.

(One nice thing about a series of novellas that can be read in any order is that if you miss one, you're not lost. On the other hand, HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING it's easy to go read book five and then remember you never read book four. Just saying.)

"Will I dishonor Cleric Thien's memory, their chosen life and their work, and allow them to be buried under a name that is no longer their own? Is that what you are asking me?"

This is a bonus gender observation, but one thing that works really well for me specifically and that intersects neatly with the themes of change and grief is that the core of this story is a conflict over identity and deadnaming[*]. Cleric Chih comes back to find that the old Divine, Cleric Thien, has died. Thien's grandchildren have come along with mammoths to forcibly take Thien's body back home with them, while Singing Hills wants the body to stay and honor Thien's life work as a cleric.

Despite all clerics using they/them pronouns, these grandchildren Tui In Hao and Vee In Yee both continually refer to Cleric Thien as "grandfather" and "he" throughout. They also go out of their way to deride Cleric Thien's award-winning scholarly work (with a side of fantasy racism). If this conflict over identity wasn't clear enough (or for readers who maybe aren't hyperaware of pronouns and gendered language), Cleric Chih even explicitly chides these two that Thien was "not a man, a cleric".

[*] A tangent tangent, but I mean deadnaming here in what feels to me to be the original sense of the term--it's not just using the wrong name under any circumstance, but more specifically it's the threat of being buried and eulogized under the wrong name by spiteful and unsupportive family.

I enjoyed the suspense and tension in this slow creeping mystery in this scifi horror novel. Ophelia, a psychiatrist from a rich family with quite a bit of buried trauma in her past, tries to save her name by joining a remote planetary reclamation crew as a therapist. The crew is tight-lipped and grieving a past crew member's death, and resent her presence (and her family). They all land on a planet to explore an abandoned station, and things quickly start to fall apart. It doesn't help that Ophelia is involved in trying to prevent ERS, a sort of "space madness" syndrome that causes people to get violent and paranoid.

What I enjoyed the most about this book was its slowly building tension. Traumas and secrets from the past intersect delightfully with mysteries in the present. There's a lot of delicious ambiguity in all of the creepiness. Are events just pranks or hallucinations or truly real? Are strange physical symptoms a sign of impending ERS? How much can Ophelia herself even be trusted?

This was just a solidly good horror book for me. Nothing world shattering, but all the threads are woven together satisfyingly.

Wow. For one thing, it's very rare that I am consistently impressed with every story in a collection, even single-author ones. And it's a wonderfully varied collection too, in subject matter, mood, and form: everything from a two-page story that's actually satisfying to the title one which could have been published as a novella on its own. There are common themes about outsider perspectives and unexpected viewpoints, but a huge range of what those things actually mean. Many of the stories are clearly informed by the author being an intersex Jewish immigrant, but again that shows up in very different ways from one story to the next - this is not an author who just has one thing to say.

Content note: some of the stories have disturbing imagery and themes around abuse, body horror, and/or being trapped. There's a list of specific content notes at the back of the book - if those sort of themes could be a problem for you, it's worth flicking to that first.

Moon of the Turning Leaves was an enjoyable follow-up to Moon of the Crusted Snow. (Every month can be #SFFBookClub sequel month if you want it to be.) If the first book was about turning inwards and more immediate survival, then this second book feels much more about turning outwards. I liked that it explains a little bit more about the what and why of the events outside their community. That said, this too is not a book directly concerned about answering these questions, and its focus remains on community and survival.

It feels akin to other post-apocalyptic journey stories, about survival, strangers, and trust. Nangohns represents the younger generation and to me feels like the focal point of the book. I love her growth into more authority, and especially her speech a third of the way into the book that convinces everyone to keep going. If I had a disappointment, it's that narratively it felt a bit too straightforward, and that the climax of the book has one outcome that felt somewhat contrived even if thematically on point.