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I really loved the way Charlie Jane Anders immerses you in the internal lives of the characters to make you care about the tiny and large stakes of their personal lives.

Anders does a great job laying out the day to day struggles of Jamie, a trans grad student wishing for an end to her dissertation, and her mother Serena, who's been wasting away ever since her wife Mae died. Jamie decides to teach her mother about the witchcraft she's done since she was a teenager to empower her mother to move beyond her grief. But is Jamie ready for what giving this much power to the activist lawyer means?

The structure tying parallels of Mae and Serena's relationship with Jamie and her partner Ro's as well as with the literature Jamie studies for her PhD is just done so incredibly well. It's a book that the small stakes feel like it should feel slow but on the contrary, I got so invested in what came next that I couldn't put it down. I really enjoyed this one.

If you like stories about the little bits of magic in the everyday and stories of when children become the teacher to their parents, you'll enjoy this one.

The Choir and its cryst-born navigators, who eventually return to the crystal they were born from, has guided humanity through the stars for a millenia. One of these navigators discovers that all is not well with her order on the day her mother dies and her mentor leaves her behind. When she teams up with a pirate captain, can they get to the bottom of the conspiracy at the heart of the Choir?

The Two Lies of Faven Smith is a pretty fast paced space opera that centers itself around the budding relationship forming between the titular navigator Faven and the pirate captain Bitter Amandine. There's sexual/romantic tension between the two through the whole book. It's a well-played tension that the narrative attention always stays right on the line of keeping it interesting and never overstaying its welcome. Like I said, it comes out through great banter and an explanation for why a character is making the stupid move that they acknowledge is the stupid move. Great characterization between the two

I really enjoyed this one, the back and forth between the sheltered Faven and the roguish Amandine was really fun to read and the plot went through all sorts of twists and turns that kept me going with one more chapter, what's another chapter, just one more.

The Choir and its navigators reminded me of a sort of cross between the Bene Gesserit and the Navigator's Guild from Dune, though the pacing for this conspiracy fueled plot moves a lot quicker.

Thanks to Orbit books for providing me a review copy through NetGalley

Note: I received a complimentary copy through Netgalley

Martin Allgeier is Third Assistant Librarian. Just some guy. He says that in the intro chapter. He swears thats the one thing he's not going to lie about.

Martin has to hire a bounty hunter to help track down the niece of the Director, the head of the government of the planet Offyonder. Can Martin, the Bounty Hunter Sol, and a street dancer find the endangered girl in the middle of a civil war before something terrible happens?

I enjoyed the infiltrating a civil war to rescue the target plot. There were a lot of exciting moments. The only issue I really had is that either early on the vocab was clunky and then the author got into a groove and it stopped or it was very in character clunky academic speech narration and onboarding to the character's POV took a chapter or two while the narration felt clunky. I'm honestly not 100% sure which, but all wording issues I noticed seemed to go away by about Chapter 3.

There are a couple twists toward the end I won't spoil here. One is basically right there practically in the text from the first chapter, but one is really well done and well set up through a good chunk of the book.

If you like spy thrillers and sci fi, and can be patient with the narration for a chapter or two, this was a fun read.

The pitch I read for this book was "Final Fantasy meets Shadow and Bone in a Korean Mythology Retelling". Shadow and Bone isn't a familiar one to me, but the other two really came through.

Ren is an orphan running from a tragic past, performing in a troupe with her adopted family. Sunho is a mercenary who awoke two years ago with no memory of his past except for his need to find his lost brother.

When Ren needs to leave home to find a cure for her Uncle after a demon attack and her hidden powers cause Imperial soldiers to hire Sunho to find her, can they both achieve their goals?

I really liked the parallel stories told from Ren's and Sunho's points of view, and the way that reveals about Ren's and Sunho's pasts unfolded in intertwined ways. The side characters of Tag and Yurhee, rebellious scoundrels who worked with Sunho before are well fleshed out just as Ren and Sunho are.

As someone who's played through Final Fantasy 7, the titular Floating World and the Under World, the slums beneath, really felt like a great homage to Midgar and there were a couple of scenes with details you could tell were added with love for other fans.

Overall, this was a fun read and I'm looking forward to the next book.

Note: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley

I really enjoyed Stardust Grail.

Maya is a grad student who used to work as an interstellar art thief. She gets called back to throw stars for one last job trying to track down an important artifact for her alien friend, Uncle. Along the way she makes new friends and discovers devastating truths about the universe she thought she knew everything about.

I really enjoyed the characters in this one and their interactions. They felt like the sort of chat you have with someone you work with. I also really liked the variety and diversity of the alien species portrayed in the book.

There's one section of the heist near the end of the book that felt a bit rushed and was a little harder to keep up with what was happening, though that might just have been an issue between me and the audio book.

Overall I really liked it, it was a fun read and one I'd be glad to recommend to friends.

What if you could mathematically prove that the government was going to fail? More, what if you had magical math showing you the one path forward to limit how long chaos would reign following that fall? That's the premise for Foundation: Hari Seldon's psychohistory predicts the fall of the Galactic Empire and he must act to plant the seeds of the future to come to limit how long humanity will be subject to the whims of arbitrary and capricious kings splitting up the territory as the scientific knowledge of the empire is lost.

I really enjoy the separate stories of the Foundation.

I'm reading science fiction classics to get a feel for what led to the Traveller RPG right now and revisiting this one was well worth it.

Asimov isn't great at character development, the characters tend to fall off and be replaced by the next generation right as they would need to change to meet the new times. But the situations are great and keep you engaged as you see how the history of the foundation has been carried forward by each generation.

This is honestly one of the science fiction classics that has aged pretty gracefully.