Some people sleep on their sides, other prefer to sleep on their backs, but a lot of y'all are sleeping on THIS BOOK and that simply cannot go on…Some people sleep on their sides, other prefer to sleep on their backs, but a lot of y'all are sleeping on THIS BOOK and that simply cannot go on…...more
Imagine someone asking you, "what are you reading?" and you have to sigh and mumble: "... Mister Impossible." Imagine someone asking you, "what are you reading?" and you have to sigh and mumble: "... Mister Impossible." ...more
Oh, this was stunning. A beautiful, sweeping tale of revenge, betrayal, warring powers, unbreakable bonds, and the stinging weight of destiny that ticOh, this was stunning. A beautiful, sweeping tale of revenge, betrayal, warring powers, unbreakable bonds, and the stinging weight of destiny that ticked every single box on the list of things I love most dearly about the genre: a deep, layered world-building, tenderly realized characters, a plot that never lags, and an emotionally and thematically vivid narrative.
At the heart of the novel is a sharp and thoughtful examination of empire, cultural imperialism, and how history can both immortalize stories and disappear them. Raybearer is a novel that understands the insidious power of empire, how it’s like a kind of poison that seeps into the groundwater, eating holes into the bulwarks of many cultures, and how it can be very, very convincing while it destroys them. The novel also speaks to many themes that we know all too well in the real world: about leadership and the tendency of the powerful to rationalize their own worst ideas without truly understanding the possibility of disaster; about patriarchy and its seamless continuity with imperialism; and about towering women with towering destinies who get written out of history.
These thematic and emotional sketches are made even more compelling with a rich cast of characters. I loved these characters. There's a vulnerability to them: they're so young and so stubborn and so wracked with troubled pasts and a bruised, wistful yearning for belonging, fighting not only to save themselves and each other but to save themselves and each other to a world “worth surviving in.” In that sense, Raybearer feels like a love letter to all the young people out there marching in the streets, speaking up against injustices, and holding themselves tall because they too refuse “to see the world as a small place, where nothing matters but [their] happiness.” The antagonists are gripping creations as well, and their slow unmasking throughout the story is both touching and terrifying. We see them yanked from their shells, all exposed flesh and raw nerves, shrunk down to something accessible and understandable in its undeniable humanity. Ifueko invites us to glimpse the world as they see it, made simple by fear and righteousness and fury, and we shake our heads in pity at some of them, roll our eyes at others, and wonder if we could ever forgive them.
All in all, Raybearer heralds a welcome new voice in fantasy. I'm so excited to read what Ifueko writes next!...more
Down Comes the Night has a very compelling premise: two enemies, standing on opposite sides of an unending war, find themselves miserably trapped withDown Comes the Night has a very compelling premise: two enemies, standing on opposite sides of an unending war, find themselves miserably trapped with unknowable terrors (and with each other) inside an estate lurking deep in the dark fog-wreathed mountains, and like any trapped thing, they must scrape up answers and fight to the bitter end, together.
This is, for the most part, a very successful debut. Down Comes the Night thrives in its themes of heritage and war and power, and in the changing relationship between Wren and Hal, and the two far outshine the sparsely decorated setup and the anemic predictability of the storyline. This is a novel that probes at the nature of what it means to inherit a story of hatred and prejudice and be in perpetual service of it. “War makes monsters out of children,” writes Saft, they live shoulder to shoulder with it and thus grow immune to its atrocities. Wren and Hal, both barely having finished being children, were taught to survive in the vocabularies of violence and monstrousness, and they did not know any other language. Their heady collision precipitates a difficult education, and it is that slow, painful unraveling of received notions and ideas about one another which constitutes the novel’s most rewarding experience.
I have to say, however—I am not sure this book lives up to its gothic billing. The story gropes unsuccessfully for the gothic note, but doesn’t fulfill it. Throughout, I found myself longing for the kind of hauntignly evocative atmosphere that Moreno-Garcia crafts so effectively in her gothic charmer, Mexican Gothic, for example. I think my expectations might have simply been exacerbated by the marketing around the book....more
me: now that I am done with finals, I just want to relax and nestle into the soothing embrace of a good book
also me: *picks up this Romeo and Juliet rme: now that I am done with finals, I just want to relax and nestle into the soothing embrace of a good book
also me: *picks up this Romeo and Juliet retelling set in 1920s gangster-run Shanghai about star-crossed exes putting aside the blood feud between them to prevent a monster from terrorizing their city that everyone tells me it's guaranteed to break my heart*...more
oh haven't you heard? Holly Black released a sneek peak at Cardan's inner thoughts:
repressed trauma incandescent rage JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE self-loathinoh haven't you heard? Holly Black released a sneek peak at Cardan's inner thoughts:
repressed trauma incandescent rage JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE self-loathing more incandescent rage JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE revenge more repressed trauma must get drunk JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE so no head? JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE how is anyone supposed to do any work around here with this fucking tail JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE oh that's right I don't have to do any work haha pass me that bottle of wine JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE JUDE JU-...more
Manuela Azul’s life is laden with eggshells, and she walked on afraid, fraying a little more every time she hThe beginning of Lobizona is nightmarish.
Manuela Azul’s life is laden with eggshells, and she walked on afraid, fraying a little more every time she has to put on her mirrored sunglasses to hide the unnatural bright yellow engulfing her eyes from the whites to the irises. The possibility of being snapped up by ICE, or of her father’s past catching up to her first, is always there, hovering in the air like an axe. Her whole life, Manu had waited for them to find her and her mother. She never doubted that they would. And then they did.
Alone, Manu sets out to look for answers to the thousand questions she has no answers to, and finds a magical school for witches and lobizones (Argentinian werewolves). For years, Manu’s eyes were a strange fact she had to bend her life around, yet here is a place where she fits with the familiar comfort of a well-worn coat. But Manu’s lies about her family are as growing thin, and when her father’s real identity is dragged to the fore, the truth of it blows out the embers of hope that let Manu believe she finally had somewhere she could call home.
** Lobizona is a vibrant representation of Argentinian culture and folklore. One of the things I relish most in fiction is when fantasy is interwoven with our world and its timeline. Lobizona dwells in the low-lit overlap of myth and reality—and the way it owns that space is spellbinding. The notion of werewolves and witches is exhilarating, and the authors milks it for all its considerable worth. A book like Lobizona doesn’t undo any clichés; it deals in them, and while it's not particularly complex or unpredictable, it perfectly counterbalances the elaborate world-building elements Garber has managed.
The strength of the novel, however, lies in its thematic gravity: the author touches upon a smorgasbord of topics that inform many conversations today (race, immigration, prejudice), and the passionate politics of the book come through with vivid clarity because we’re lost inside the experiences of its protagonists. There’s a sympathetic sense of dislocation and dread that permeates every corner of the story, and which kept my interest firmly moored to the page. Manu has lost the unbruised part of herself when she lost her freedom to exist without the constant fear of being wrenched away from her home. It’s the sort of truth that one can say only when they’re looking away from it, offhand, distracted, because to meet its eye is enough to curdle your blood. But hope is small enough to nest within Manu’s palm, and seeing all her courage pile itself hand over hand was a welcome respite.
I knew I would love Cemetery Boys from the first few pages.
Aiden Thomas lured me in with an enchanting mix of mystery and magic, but it's his indelibI knew I would love Cemetery Boys from the first few pages.
Aiden Thomas lured me in with an enchanting mix of mystery and magic, but it's his indelible characters that made me stay. The author sees the characters—really sees them—and wants them to see themselves. In his hands, their stories transcend what is expected of them, but Cemetery Boys more than just an exercise in subverting expectations. There’s so much tenderness infused into this novel, fizzing so joyously through its veins: the characters are rendered with so much care, meticulously polished in all their conflicted, multifaceted glory.
Our protagonist Yadriel, a 16-year-old gay Latinx trans boy, successfully performs the ritual his family denied him in front of Lady Death, and inadvertently unlocks his magical powers as a brujo. Soon after, Yadriel discovers that his cousin has suddenly and inexplicably died but that his spirit is nowhere to be found. The mystery calls to Yadriel, and determined, he sets out to root it out. If Yadriel can find his cousin’s body and release his spirit to the afterlife, he can finally prove to his family that he is a true brujo—and a boy. Yadriel’s plan definitely does not include falling for one Julian Diaz, the spirit of a handsome dead boy Yadriel accidentally summons. But now it is just the two of them, tangled up in a mystery they don't know where to begin to solve.
Yadriel wanted to be accepted by his family and community with all the fierce longing of a thwarted child. He yearned for it even when his family family refused to acknowledge him as a brujo and as a boy, even when he had to endure painful conversations where he felt constantly misunderstood, even when he tired of always being the one to swallow his hurt and extend people the benefit of the doubt. Yadriel knew that it was still more endurable than the inconsolable grief of losing his connection to his family.
I think oftentimes in queer YA books the queer protagonist is either wholeheartedly embraced by their family, or shunned by them completely. But few novels venture into the vast area in between where it feels like the people around you are embracing you with an arm, but pushing you back with the other, and how painful and taxing it is to navigate that. Yadriel’s family claims to accept him as a boy, but throwaway comments like his dad asking him to “stay [there] with the rest of the women” or his grandmother telling him he’ll always be “[her] little girl” cut like a knife, swift and deep. Yadriel did not know how to fit love and resentment into the same cupboard. He loved his family and community and wanted to belong with them, but their failure to embrace him the way he deserved to be embraced hurt, and Yadriel struggled with how to reconcile the two.
In one of the novel's most heartwarming scenes, Julian tells Yadriel, “You don’t need anyone’s permission to be you, Yads,” and something inside Yadriel (and me) lights up. Wanting acceptance and waiting for permission can feel like flip sides of the same coin sometimes, flashing end over end. Where does one end and the other begins?
“Why do you have to prove anything to anyone?”
Speaking of Julian, the loveable ghost of my heart. Julian Diaz is like cheer in a bottle. Born with his heart on the outside of his body, Julian loves very deeply is loyal to the point of recklessness. But the rumors hanging heavy around Julian spole of brawls and drug deals, of a runaway mother and a dead father, and decided who Julian is: the brooding, bad boy with a tortured past and an infamous present. Thankfully, the novel handles this trope by walking right up to it and smacking it upside the head. Cemetery Boys shows us Julian with his defenses lowered, and there is an untried, fragile feeling to the unfurling of his character. Instead of a troublemaker and a “bad boy”, we simply see… a kid. A kid who is bright and loud and kind and feels most at home where there is jolly chaos to be sowed, who makes endearingly bad jokes, and hilariously mixes up his idioms, and has so much warmth and energy thrumming through him it’s as though he is twice as alive as the next person.
There’s something so tenuous and vulnerable on the line at the beginning of one’s life, this novel demonstrates, something that could be so easily broken if you’re not careful. The names people assigned Julian, wishing to see in him only what they wanted to see, had a marked effect on him. As a kid, with little language to shape around his feelings, Julian simply accepted what everyone else told him, and started believing that there must be something wrong in him, rotting away. It's heartbreaking, and makes you wish adults were just kinder to children. Imagine how different a world we would be living in.
I really loved this book. Cemetery Boys is one of those stories that feel so impossibly familiar, a thing already part of yourself, and I hope many readers find their way to it....more
“It is what it is.” With such a simple yet foreboding line, Rutkoski paints a vivid portrait of an intriguing, deadly world in the first installment o“It is what it is.” With such a simple yet foreboding line, Rutkoski paints a vivid portrait of an intriguing, deadly world in the first installment of The Midnight Lie series. A world that lays itself open for only one faction: the High Kith. The High Kith wear their wealth as comfortably as the expensive leather that is forbidden in the Ward. They drip with perfume and are corrupt from soft living, and the best our protagonist, Nirrim, can hope for is a life spent creeping in their generous shadows.
Nirrim worked to fit herself inside the narrow confines of this life, the words “it is what it is” like a mantra, like fingers reaching into her mouth, pinching her tongue and keeping her from crying out. But there are gaps between the bars: whispers of long-forgotten gods, scarlet where the white paint on the walls of the Ward had chipped, an Elysium bird sailing high over the Ward like an omen. A girl: a sea-faring schemer named Sid whose eyes fastened on Nirrim across a low-lit prison cell as she whispered of magic left like a door, ajar onto a new and undiscovered world. Sid’s words give Nirrim a single threshold of hope on which to balance, a narrow precipice of hope, but can Nirrim climb through the mirror and slide into the skin of the girl she imagines herself to be, brave and unafraid of falling?
** While on the surface this seems like a story we’ve seen before, Rutkoski infuses exhilarating new life into it through beautiful language, distinct characters, and remarkable world-building elements that mesh like clockwork with themes of deception, privilege, greed, and an acute exploration of the truths we conceal from ourselves until one day we surface and find them waiting.
The Midnight Lie unfolds unhurriedly with harrowing beauty, precision, and confidence, but there's a rhythm to it. Reading this book, you get the sense that the author is careful to unspool the secrets of her world with maximum suspense and mystique. It is clear that Rutkoski is playing the long game here, and she's playing it rather superbly. Forging on, you come across a plot that, predictably yet thrillingly, involves far more than a quick hit, and one of the most tantalizing hints of things to come is the frequent mention of the existence of magic, both in Nirrim’s past as well as her terrifying present. The ending, too, is a virtuoso move that shows just how much thought was poured into the novel, and my mind could not settle on a proper question to ask out of the hundred that immediately bubbled up. Rutkoski has cultivated fertile ground for the next books in her promising series to grow, and I will be counting the days until the sequel.
What made this story soar highest for me, however, is the amount of care and attention infused into the characters. Nirrim is the focus of the novel, and the words that fall from her were often so vulnerable they pulled in my chest.
Unlike Sid who seems to walk through life with a giant’s indifference to the world, Nirrim’s desires and motivations creep into the prose like whispered secrets, held back by the careful thinking of a mind accustomed to good behavior. Because for Nirrim that’s what wants and desires are: secrets. She toys with them the way a child holds their palm to a candle flame, daring to get just close enough to feel the stabbing licks of pain. They are relics of a life she’s never lived, buried and forgotten, the possibilities tucked away for some future time when Nirrim would be strong enough to look directly at it. But once they are unearthed, there is simply no containing them.
This book also have one of the most clear-eyed and affecting portraits of emotional abuse that I’ve read in a while. Nirrim begins to see a side of her surrogate mother that leaves her cold—a cruel and merciless side that, for discerning readers, was present long before Nirrim faces it. Years of emotional manipulation and abuse have distorted Nirrim’s perception, and because her (magical) inability to tell illusion from truth has already taught her not to trust herself, Nirrim looked at her “mother’s” possessive, conditional desire to own and mistook it for love. It’s not until Nirrim meets Sid that shards of her latent memories force themselves out like splinters, that Nirrim’s world becomes translucent as a window. The acclimation that comes with time, like a body adjusting to a too-hot bath, is chillingly observed throughout the novel, and it’s one of the many jagged, tragic details that make this book so hard-hitting. I really enjoyed seeing Nirrim’s fear break like a fever, and I can’t wait to discover where her journey takes her.
Ultimately this was a solid, enjoyable book, and a great start to a promising new series. Highly recommended!...more
The story of the Shah’s twin sister came to the people of Atashar as most rumors do, as a drifting set of jokes and have-you-heards that combined and The story of the Shah’s twin sister came to the people of Atashar as most rumors do, as a drifting set of jokes and have-you-heards that combined and recombined themselves slowly into a single tale: a poisonous girl with the blood of a div moving in her veins, a burden to her family, living in the shadows, cursed and reviled. But unlike most rumors, this one is true.
Soraya, our protagonist, knows fear in the shape of her own face, in the monstrous thing that prowled inside her. For years, she walked the edges of her curse, looking for a crack, but it held on. Until Azad, a handsome young soldier captures a female div named Parvaneh, and all the hope Soraya had shut out comes roaring back in. Parvaneh might be the only one who can show Soraya the gaps between the bars of her curse, but to escape her life, Soraya might have to tear a hole in her family’s.
** The premise of Girl, Serpent, Thornpromises a story that gathers Persian mythology into an exhilarating antiheroic slant and bears the indentations of a dark and twisted fairytale with all the rich density of horror—and the potential is definitely there.
One of my favorite things about this novel is how heavy it is with the foreshadowing: the story often feels like a clock winding tighter as the ending draws near, and the world—though only delicately sketched since the author does not explain or engage with every aspect of its nature—is sharpened with urgency.
Soraya too is an interesting protagonist, and the narrative hints too at how far more powerful she is than she gives herself credit for. The question of “What will Soraya allow herself to become?” kept me turning the pages. Will she remain the helpless girl, locked away and withering on the vine of life? The quiescent serpent, ignoring the coiled thing inside her, that gathering of something hard and unyielding? Or the girl made of thorns, with a sting like fire? For a while, I thought the story would balloon in that latter direction. The narrative, unfortunately, often retreats into a flimsy plot populated with characters that could have been more substantially fleshed out, and culminating eventually into a big reveal that’s obvious from the book’s earliest pages—and one that isn’t all that gripping in the first place.
Ultimately, this is my biggest quibble with the story—that it cries out for a more challenging, better developed execution of a really promising premise. Still that’s not enough to put a permanent dent in the novel’s spell. As the story powers forward, and Soraya is forced to brush with her moral code, the novel probes, painstakingly, at Soraya’s desire to be just, to somehow behave well despite the contradictory desires of the heart. The author also affectingly articulates the ways that humanizing and dehumanizing those we love can be flip sides of the same coin. Here, I wish the novel had dwelled longer on the sapphic romance that blossoms between Soraya and Parvaneh who, amid the swirling chaos, have looked at each other and found a possibility of something.
All quibbles aside, this was a solid read. I just wish I enjoyed it more....more
chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡
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