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(Reposting this here to keep all my book reviews in one place, sorry!)

David Mogo Godhunter is a urban fantasy book about a demigod living in post-apocalyptic Nigeria. Gods and godlings have invaded and taken over and destroyed large parts of Lagos, and David is scraping out a living capturing wayward godlings that are causing trouble.

The strongest part of the book for me was the Lagos setting, of its island and mainland, and its observations about culture even in a post-apocalyptic world. It's just got such a solid sense of place running through the whole book.

The beginning of the book hooked me with David getting forced into a job he doesn't want to take, but the middle and end got very muddy plot-wise and character-wise. Some of this is that due to some plot it felt like David became a different (and less likeable) character. I think also maybe this story hewed too close to some shonen anime-esque superhero conflict arc for my tastes.

(Also, and this is minor and petty, but cis authors stop making references to the transphobic wizard lady books challenge [impossible])

The Thursday Murder Club is a murder mystery book that centers a group of people from a posh retirement community who take it upon themselves to try to solve local mysteries. The characters are a delight and the mystery is solid: red herrings, bonus mysteries, and satisfying answers.

The best part about this book is the characters themselves and their retirement community. It felt like a real portrayal of folks who might live there and what they're dealing with--grief around death of loved ones and friends, the possibilities (and realities) of senility and disability, and also just the complications of younger family. All of the characters felt like unique and interesting people, and it was quite fun to see the murder club team in action playing off of each other.

(All that said, there are some minor unintended things in this book that rubbed me the wrong way that I'll put in its own comment here.)

Escaping Exodus is an afrofuture science fiction novel about future space colonists living inside of giant space whales. It's a hard book to pin down--it's messy, literally and metaphorically.

I want to say this book is a YA book, as it feels like bingo full coverage of ghosthoney's dystopian YA tiktok video. Forbidden love across exaggerated and artificial class boundaries. Wild biological worldbuilding elements. Matriarchy and gender flips. Novel family structures. Horrible Omelas-esque abuses. One of the protagonists starts a revolution. But, it's also much darker and full of way more body horror than I usually expect from YA as well.

I would love to know if there is a word for this, but this book engages in the technique where it uses a common noun like "heart murmur" but then it turns out to have an unexpected meaning in this world. In this case, Adalla is a beastworker who at one point is responsible for cleaning out parts of the space whale beast's heart, like taking care of heart murmurs. But then it turns out that heart murmurs are not just things to be removed, but are also living creatures and are sometimes kept as pets?!

For me the best parts of the book are all in the worldbuilding. Everything is biological; permanent housing is made out of bones, the handwashing stations are hoglets, people get high on random gasses from the beast, and mucus is used for space travel. I love this idea of tiny humans trying to eke out a living instead of a giant space beast, and parasitically trying to take care of it as well.

Past that, I think there's a lot that's rough about the book; the plot pulls the characters along and there's not as much depth to them as I want. A number of plot points or world details don't make a ton of sense if you think too much about them. The relationship definitely makes no sense to me. The whole thing just feels not polished in a way that makes it hard to recommend.

Mostly hoping that I can kiss you without something weird happening, I'm hoping I can. I'm worried that I can't.

This quote is out of context, but I'm just leaving this here for anybody else who has read this, but holy moly the weirdness of this scene and everything that happens afterwards. I was... unprepared.

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.

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.