Lately I’ve been plucking books almost randomly off my to-be-read bookcase (which really needs to be organized so it’s not quite so random). I’d rather forgotten about picking up this one. A somewhat dated (with respect to gender politics) short gothic with mystery elements, set in an ancient villa and the Etruscan catacombs beneath it. Archaeology, ancient mysteries, terrible family secrets, lots of peril that might have been avoided if people talked to each other more about the odd things they knew about the villa and its former inhabitants.
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A novella(?) set in the author’s Dominion of the Fallen series, with a tight little murder mystery embedded in the familial/court politics of the underwater dragon kingdom. Lots of drama, angst, peril, and socio-political negotiation to provide distraction from the murder. And that’s just between our dragon & fallen angel married protagonists. I’m going to guess that this story might be a bit too in media res for any reader who hasn’t read the Dominion novels, but you should go read those because they’re really good.
A while ago I started working my way through reviews of things I’ve read in the last year or two. Ha, ha, yes, my up-to-datedness is that bad. And then in the last month or so, I finally seem to have broken through my “reading block”. So let’s spend some time getting reviews done, though they’re going to be briefer than I sometimes write. I’m scheduling 18 reviews (following my usual one-blog-per-day maximum) which gets me caught up with everything in my spreadsheet, though I need to comb through iBooks and other files to see if I’ve overlooked something.
Set in the same magical-Regency world as Cho’s earlier Sorcerer to the Crown, but overlapping only slightly in characters, this book tells the story of two sisters in Malaysia, struck by a curse that sends one on a quest to England and fairyland to find a cure for her sister’s fading. Along the way, she must conceal her own lack of magic, enlist the aid of the sorceress royal and a dragon, and untangle the mystery of her own identity.
This is a psychological study of the confined lives and expectations of women in post-WWII England. Using flashbacks, it traces the lives of a mother and daughter as every turn seems to snatch away what they felt they were promised, constantly requiring them to have less, to do less, and to be less (manifested as anorexia by the daughter).
On a whim, I picked this up in audio because I wasn't sure when I'd get to it on the page. Given how late I am to the party, I'm aware that there's now an entire series of the "wayward children" stories, involving those who have gone through portals to another realm...and now can't find their way back. But this first story is less a classic portal fantasy than it is a classic murder mystery. And when all the inhabitants of the mysterious spooky mansion are more than a little odd, sorting out the suspects can be a problem.
I don't quite know why, but this book just didn't grab me and I ended up not finishing it. Maybe it's because I'm enough outside the online culture being depicted that it felt both alien and over-explained. Maybe I had too hard a time trying to get inside the protagonist's head.
There are times in your life when you really need a deeply engrossing story that will take you away from the here and now for the space of a couple hours. One of those times is when you’re sitting in an emergency room waiting for them to confirm your pulmonary embolism. One of those stories in Nghi Vo’s novella The Empress of Salt and Fortune. I don’t recommend the former, but I do recommend the later.
This sapphic, Vietnamese-inspired historic fantasy is warm and cozy, like sipping tea in front of a blazing fire, with a cat sitting on your lap, where the cat might turn into a tiger and the fire might burn your palace down. Aliette has the knack of compressing enormous amounts of world-building into a very few pages. You can easily read this story in a single bite, but it immediately plunges you into the deep back-story of a princess-hostage, the fraught politics of maintaining an unequal power balance, and the personal hazards of re-igniting an old love affair.
This isn’t so much a review of the book as a discussion of my reaction to it. For what that’s worth. I picked up Romancing the Beat because it was recommended on a podcast for authors who want to analyze what does or doesn’t work in their romance plots.
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