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692 reviews
Gate to Kagoshima by Poppy Kuroki
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.75
Gate to Kagoshima is a historical romance, very Outlander meets “The Last Samurai”. I appreciated the author’s deft hand at centering the story in its two timelines (though there’s a part of me that’s devastated to see the 2000s are historical enough to be a time placed in history with relics of old such as the Motorola Razr flip phone), and the thematic throughline of our protagonist, Isla, seeking out answers about her heritage and where a part of her comes from.
However, my enjoyment of the novel was hindered by several other factors. Odd as it may sound, Kagoshima was a little too readable; the prose was so simplistic that it moved from an invisible vehicle by which to consume a story, one that required no remark one way or another, into something that aged down the book and made it feel like it was for a much younger audience. Were it not for the warfare and sex scenes, I’d call this novel accessible to middle-grade readers, and not nearly nuanced enough to get across the more harrowing elements of the story to its YA or adult audiences.
This disconnect colored other elements of the story as well. The pacing of the novel was quick, which it had to be to cover the several elapsed months of the rebellion, but that left little to no room for “showing” characters’ emotional arcs or doing more than telling that time had passed. It was hard to feel a sense of narrative urgency while reading because Isla’s goal throughout was just… waiting. Waiting to meet her ancestor if possible, waiting to get back to her own time. She had no intermediary goals to carry her between any of those points, and she ended up just being swept along into a war that I as a reader had no time to begin caring about.
I wish Isla had been more proactive in figuring out about her ancestor instead of having the answer of it all fall into her lap. 2005 is modern enough that she should’ve been able to guess that she might be something of a “reverse ghost”, complete with western ideas of ghosts having unfinished business that prevents them from moving on. The things she’d do would make her more of an outsider, yes, but I need my protagonist to have some goal or agency or something to carry their own story. As it was, I couldn’t tell if Kuroki wanted to write a romance centering Isla and the samurai Kei or just a creative nonfiction piece about the Satsuma rebellion, because as soon as it was possible, the focus shifted to the latter in a way that made any bit of romance we got later on feel forced/out of place/surprising rather than satisfying. The scenes of warfare were a good change of pace in that they showed the interruption to life and accumulation of trauma, but because we were following an outsider instead of someone in Satsuma who had seen these sentiments brewing, it felt like it all happened so fast with no time to mourn characters we barely got to know anyway. By trying to play both games, I felt Gate to Kagoshima failed to deliver on either.
Because of these large scale problems, I was more aware of smaller gripes throughout the story that I may otherwise have handwaved.
The worldbuilding element of the time travel Yoshii gate not being tied to a specific location broke my immersion in that speculative fiction element (there has to be rules to the magic!). It could have been a good way to save Kei while the rebellion was failing—he needs to escort Isla back to the temple to be able to go home— but instead it just? Appears wherever? And sends Isla straight back to where she came from? And it only sometimes needs a storm to work, and sometimes it makes a musical sound you can follow. There was also inconsistency with the use of the honorifics, where some have dashes and some run into the name that they follow in a way that made the story just a little harder to read. Finally, I just felt the story hit one too many Outlander beats, down to calling Isla a gaijin, and I’m just not a fan when books are too similar to comp titles. It made this short book a slog to get through—if this weren’t an ARC I was reading for review, I would have DNFed.
A Far Wilder Magic by Allison Saft
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
In Bed with a Highlander by Maya Banks
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
Pixels of You by Yuko Ota, Ananth Hirsh
hopeful
inspiring
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
I really adored this story, but it falls in the trap that so many graphic novels and novellas do for me where the page count just doesn't support the narrative weight of all the elements promised within the story.
I loved Indira and Fawn each, with the former's chip-on-her-shoulder attitude and the way that her internalized ableism and technophobia come from being the very sort of person that AI and advanced tech of the sort have been (intentionally or otherwise) programed into seeing as "less than", and the latter occupying a weird middle ground and choosing to look as human as possible to preempt the prejudice of humans and inadvertently being looked down upon by AI and humans each, and yet still having such a fascination and love for a world telling her from all sides that she isn't welcome. Their rivals-to-friends-to-lovers arc was lovely, but I wish we had the room to focus more on them building that connection through making art, which was the thing that was meant to have pulled them together in the first place. I think that would've let the themes inherent to each character AND to their union as a romantic couple shine more as well.
I also really loved the side characters we got, particularly Fawn's family and how supportive they try to be of their daughter whose desires they don't personally understand. And of how much they did their best to make Indira feel welcome at their house when she came over. It was really sweet to see that sort of a family dynamic and made Fawn even more easy to love by seeing her through their eyes a bit.
I appreciated the "scene break" pages that were all black with a white text quote describing a bit of the history of AI and how the world came to be, and the complications inherent in an integration of a Made race whose consciousness developed by way of deeply biased computer programs with a world that's not as white, straight, or male as was built into them, but again, there was less room than I'd have liked given to deeper thematic exploration. Doesn't mean I didn't still really enjoy this read! It was quick, packed a punch, and I'm always a sucker for two girls smooching. I'll definitely be looking forward to more from these authors/artists.
I loved Indira and Fawn each, with the former's chip-on-her-shoulder attitude and the way that her internalized ableism and technophobia come from being the very sort of person that AI and advanced tech of the sort have been (intentionally or otherwise) programed into seeing as "less than", and the latter occupying a weird middle ground and choosing to look as human as possible to preempt the prejudice of humans and inadvertently being looked down upon by AI and humans each, and yet still having such a fascination and love for a world telling her from all sides that she isn't welcome. Their rivals-to-friends-to-lovers arc was lovely, but I wish we had the room to focus more on them building that connection through making art, which was the thing that was meant to have pulled them together in the first place. I think that would've let the themes inherent to each character AND to their union as a romantic couple shine more as well.
I also really loved the side characters we got, particularly Fawn's family and how supportive they try to be of their daughter whose desires they don't personally understand. And of how much they did their best to make Indira feel welcome at their house when she came over. It was really sweet to see that sort of a family dynamic and made Fawn even more easy to love by seeing her through their eyes a bit.
I appreciated the "scene break" pages that were all black with a white text quote describing a bit of the history of AI and how the world came to be, and the complications inherent in an integration of a Made race whose consciousness developed by way of deeply biased computer programs with a world that's not as white, straight, or male as was built into them, but again, there was less room than I'd have liked given to deeper thematic exploration. Doesn't mean I didn't still really enjoy this read! It was quick, packed a punch, and I'm always a sucker for two girls smooching. I'll definitely be looking forward to more from these authors/artists.
The Slummer: Quarters Till Death by Geoffrey Simpson
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
1.25
My goodness, this was difficult to get through. I read this book with my partner and the laughter we shared at the absurdity of what we were reading bumps up my rating by at least a half star.
Folks, this book is just badly written. On a prose level, the writing is wooden and repetitive, relying on finance-bro sports-adjacent platitudes to take the place of character interiority descriptive action. You know, the elements of sports fiction that make it worth engaging with? It was only in the final race of this book that the author actually detailed what was going on with Ben, the protagonist, on a physical and emotional level and took us through the entire scene with him, which was far too late to make me care about his journey. Usually, error-filled prose jars me from a story, but there was such a reliance on telling over showing (or, as was the case for any moment of potential tension, like a race or a moment of dialogue promising conflict, glossing over and simply telling that the moment was resolved without problem) that I felt there was no story to be jarred from. The errors are actually what I spent most time on, just because some of the dangling modifiers and pronoun confusion were so bad that I needed to take a beat to figure out what actually was supposed to be happening.
There’s not much I can say about the plot of the story, because again, there was no tension to be had. None of Ben’s obsession with running got in the way of his relationships (his gf Maya, described at one point as a “jewel of the slums”, exists only to support Ben’s dreams and later get fridges in a cartoonish mockery of gang violence to fuel Ben’s man-pain (even the memory of her refuses to take up space in the narrative, with Ben deciding that focusing on his running instead of mourning her for longer than a month is what she would’ve wanted for him) , and his brother and father only give him the barest of a hard time about running, but never in the sense of “hey you need to get a job and contribute to paying rent or we’ll all be homeless” as one might expect given the setting they live in), nor does his poverty present any actual roadblock to his running journey (where does he get the money to pay for the food he needs when burning this many calories recreationally, let alone food providing adequate adequate nutrition, or clothes to wear when he’s sweated through them, or the free time to run this much and do leisure activities like catch and release fishing with Maya? I don’t know, and it appears the author doesn’t, either). Ben’s main stumbling blocks come from one element: that he’s not genetically engineered to be a great athlete because his family is poor.
And that poverty is where the book falls apart.
Thematically, The Slummer doesn’t know what it wants to say. It’s clearly born of the author’s love for Gattica (soooooo many scenes are direct pulls from the movie), but the message of “being a perfect genetic specimen for A Task doesn’t beat having grit and drive and desire to do it” gets muddied when the author’s desire to make a statement about systemic issues stemming from class division say “but actually drive doesn’t mean shit when you can’t afford to feed it”. Or they do in this author’s hands, because he refuses to let his protagonist fail in a way that supports the latter theme, since he’s so enamored of the former. If this were a straight Gattica inspired sports fiction story, it may have done better, because Simpson has absolutely no place writing about poverty with any degree of nuance.
This is evidenced most clearly in his paper-thin characterization of every single character. There is no nuance to either the slummers or to the elites. Without exception, the latter are bigots who refuse to engage with the humanity of the slummers, but never in the subtle ways that systemic racism and homophobia often present themselves (where cishet white folks can applaud themselves for not being violent bigots and indeed might consider themselves allies even as they do harm). Instead, we get a Jim Crow attitude without the sensitivity such a setting deserves. As for the slummers, we get many a faceless “thug” doing violence in their own communities, and a Tent City “that should have its own zip code” and smells bad and is dangerous for women to be in. Classy. Real compassionate take, Mr. Simpson.
Ben, the protagonist, never actually engages with his community. We don’t see how they feel about his racing successes except as a faceless mass (Simpson can’t decide if they’re proud to see a Slummer make it or hate him for escaping what they could not. It’s the thematic confusion again, where the author chooses one over the other depending on what point he wants to make. In deft hands it could work! But not here). Except for one little boy who idolizes Ben (like everyone else does) and wants to be a runner just like him. Very saccharine.
Speaking of exclusively being around to blow smoke up Ben’s ass, we reach the side character zone. Frontliners include:
- Every Named Female Character (I wish I were joking. But all of them “believe in him” and “know he con do anything he sets his mind to” and “are his biggest fan”, from his girlfriend Maya to a hot reporter obsessed with his story to the woman who sponsors Ben’s racing and lets him know that it’s not systemic injustice or genetic predilection that wants to keep him out of the world of professional sport, it’s One Mean Man™️)
- his coach, a former runner from the times before genetic engineering of babies… who happens to be a Black alcoholic absent father. And who on page says that knowing Ben is the best thing that ever happened to him and that he could die happy if Ben just follows his dreams. No, he doesn’t reconnect with his own son ever (that might pull focus from Ben!). He also doesn’t actually do any useful coaching on page, but that’s to be expected by this point in the review.
- Ben’s father, the workhorse foil to Ben who at first doesn’t support running b/c he worries Ben will overexert himself, but ultimately knows that Ben is like his mother, too good for the slums and destined for bigger things. (Ben has a rivalry with his brother where bro takes after dad but it’s resolved/hand waved and bro believes in Ben, too)
- Ben’s running hero, Cyrus, whose mom was a slummer (we find this out when Cyrus, unprompted, tells Ben the story of his father hearing his songbird mother sing and whisking her into a better life. This man appears in person on a max of 8 pages in this book). The other elite runners are Mean and Racist, but not Cyrus. He believes in Ben ™️.
(If this is getting repetitive, try reading 300+ pages of it, presented earnestly as though it were a story worth reading.)
Finally, we have Ben, the clearest self-insert I’ve ever seen (and I’ve read ACOTAR). The author took the advice “write what you know” and sprinted ahead with it at full-tilt. Ben is a runner from Cleveland, Ohio, who runs 5Ks competitively and ends up racing for Kent State. And I’ll bet you a dollar you can guess the hometown, alma mater, and race length of the author from that sentence alone. Ben exclusively has flaws of the “job interview” sort—he’s TOO passionate and TOO driven and TOO stubborn about his running—and none of those come up in any way that can hurt him, eg. inter-character conflict or being the explicit cause of an injury that has long term deleterious effects to his goals. I think the author felt too close to him to want to give him any problems where he wasn’t an innocent victim of circumstance, but that just made him boring. The only difference between the two is that Ben is ethnically ambiguous in a way that lets upper middle class white men like the author think they can write about systemic oppression and poverty.
I am struggling to find an audience I would recommend this book for, or an element of the writing that I can applaud in any honest way. I can’t fault the author for his belief system, which (while privileged to the point of the points he’s making about systemic injustice feel like Michael Scott talking to Daryl in The Office) is on the right side of morality. But politics do not a good book make. And unfortunately neither does any of the rest of it.
Folks, this book is just badly written. On a prose level, the writing is wooden and repetitive, relying on finance-bro sports-adjacent platitudes to take the place of character interiority descriptive action. You know, the elements of sports fiction that make it worth engaging with? It was only in the final race of this book that the author actually detailed what was going on with Ben, the protagonist, on a physical and emotional level and took us through the entire scene with him, which was far too late to make me care about his journey. Usually, error-filled prose jars me from a story, but there was such a reliance on telling over showing (or, as was the case for any moment of potential tension, like a race or a moment of dialogue promising conflict, glossing over and simply telling that the moment was resolved without problem) that I felt there was no story to be jarred from. The errors are actually what I spent most time on, just because some of the dangling modifiers and pronoun confusion were so bad that I needed to take a beat to figure out what actually was supposed to be happening.
There’s not much I can say about the plot of the story, because again, there was no tension to be had. None of Ben’s obsession with running got in the way of his relationships (his gf Maya, described at one point as a “jewel of the slums”, exists only to support Ben’s dreams and later
And that poverty is where the book falls apart.
Thematically, The Slummer doesn’t know what it wants to say. It’s clearly born of the author’s love for Gattica (soooooo many scenes are direct pulls from the movie), but the message of “being a perfect genetic specimen for A Task doesn’t beat having grit and drive and desire to do it” gets muddied when the author’s desire to make a statement about systemic issues stemming from class division say “but actually drive doesn’t mean shit when you can’t afford to feed it”. Or they do in this author’s hands, because he refuses to let his protagonist fail in a way that supports the latter theme, since he’s so enamored of the former. If this were a straight Gattica inspired sports fiction story, it may have done better, because Simpson has absolutely no place writing about poverty with any degree of nuance.
This is evidenced most clearly in his paper-thin characterization of every single character. There is no nuance to either the slummers or to the elites. Without exception, the latter are bigots who refuse to engage with the humanity of the slummers, but never in the subtle ways that systemic racism and homophobia often present themselves (where cishet white folks can applaud themselves for not being violent bigots and indeed might consider themselves allies even as they do harm). Instead, we get a Jim Crow attitude without the sensitivity such a setting deserves. As for the slummers, we get many a faceless “thug” doing violence in their own communities, and a Tent City “that should have its own zip code” and smells bad and is dangerous for women to be in. Classy. Real compassionate take, Mr. Simpson.
Ben, the protagonist, never actually engages with his community. We don’t see how they feel about his racing successes except as a faceless mass (Simpson can’t decide if they’re proud to see a Slummer make it or hate him for escaping what they could not. It’s the thematic confusion again, where the author chooses one over the other depending on what point he wants to make. In deft hands it could work! But not here). Except for one little boy who idolizes Ben (like everyone else does) and wants to be a runner just like him. Very saccharine.
Speaking of exclusively being around to blow smoke up Ben’s ass, we reach the side character zone. Frontliners include:
- Every Named Female Character (I wish I were joking. But all of them “believe in him” and “know he con do anything he sets his mind to” and “are his biggest fan”, from his girlfriend Maya to a hot reporter obsessed with his story to the woman who
- his coach, a former runner from the times before genetic engineering of babies… who happens to be a Black alcoholic absent father. And who on page says that knowing Ben is the best thing that ever happened to him and that he could die happy if Ben just follows his dreams. No, he doesn’t reconnect with his own son ever (that might pull focus from Ben!). He also doesn’t actually do any useful coaching on page, but that’s to be expected by this point in the review.
- Ben’s father, the workhorse foil to Ben who at first doesn’t support running b/c he worries Ben will overexert himself, but ultimately knows that Ben is like his mother, too good for the slums and destined for bigger things. (Ben has a rivalry with his brother where bro takes after dad but it’s resolved/hand waved and bro believes in Ben, too)
- Ben’s running hero, Cyrus, whose mom was a slummer (we find this out when Cyrus, unprompted, tells Ben the story of his father hearing his songbird mother sing and whisking her into a better life. This man appears in person on a max of 8 pages in this book). The other elite runners are Mean and Racist, but not Cyrus. He believes in Ben ™️.
(If this is getting repetitive, try reading 300+ pages of it, presented earnestly as though it were a story worth reading.)
Finally, we have Ben, the clearest self-insert I’ve ever seen (and I’ve read ACOTAR). The author took the advice “write what you know” and sprinted ahead with it at full-tilt. Ben is a runner from Cleveland, Ohio, who runs 5Ks competitively and ends up racing for Kent State. And I’ll bet you a dollar you can guess the hometown, alma mater, and race length of the author from that sentence alone. Ben exclusively has flaws of the “job interview” sort—he’s TOO passionate and TOO driven and TOO stubborn about his running—and none of those come up in any way that can hurt him, eg. inter-character conflict or being the explicit cause of an injury that has long term deleterious effects to his goals. I think the author felt too close to him to want to give him any problems where he wasn’t an innocent victim of circumstance, but that just made him boring. The only difference between the two is that Ben is ethnically ambiguous in a way that lets upper middle class white men like the author think they can write about systemic oppression and poverty.
I am struggling to find an audience I would recommend this book for, or an element of the writing that I can applaud in any honest way. I can’t fault the author for his belief system, which (while privileged to the point of the points he’s making about systemic injustice feel like Michael Scott talking to Daryl in The Office) is on the right side of morality. But politics do not a good book make. And unfortunately neither does any of the rest of it.
Hoarded by the Dragon by Lillian Lark
emotional
funny
lighthearted
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
A fun addition to the series! I always appreciate when a story set in a fantastical world can offer both an insider’s and outsider’s perspective on it, and by virtue of being, respectively, an ancient dragon from a time long past and a witch who only realized she wasn’t human in her late teens and thus grew up out of the loop, the protagonists of those stories managed to ride the line and offer just enough of each perspective to keep the shenanigans flowing and the plot interesting.
I liked Katarina as a protagonist. I found her school-of-hard-knocks attitude coupled with her desperate desire to know herself and her place in the world to be really easy to sympathize with, and her POV was voiced snd readable. Her loyalty to her friends, as well as her desire to redeem her previously questionable actions, were demonstrated on page and thus easy to believe, and they made the plot Go™️ to boot! Excellent leading lady.
My main gripe is that I don’t love Kalos and Katarina for each other. Or rather, I don’t love him for her. It took far too long for him to get on board with being in love with her, and she spent far too long after her feelings had grown allowing him to keep her in that awful limbo of “we’re in a situationship but I’m literally having your baby”. I love a good groveling when an imbalance of feelings-timing happens and leads to someone getting hurt, but it happens too little and too late for my tastes. There’s a part where Kalos asks Rina if she will stay with him after he tells her he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to love her, and while I really appreciate this book for giving the pair of them such a frank discussion of feelings and boundaries, I wanted Rina to respect herself enough to tell him “hell no”! The proximity for the duration of pregnancy I understand, as her life literally depends on it, but Kalos’s behavior never bridged the gap from “kind of a dick” to “awkward with his feelings but means well” for me. Normalize not letting men treat women poorly in 2025 even if they feel like they have a good reason.
I did think the steamy scenes were really hot, and I appreciated the lore given to the world at large (Fae gates! Monster babies! New info on the council and on the seedy underbelly of the magical world!) and the set up for the next book (marriage of convenience! Bickering to lovers!), but I don’t think I’ll be returning to this installment.
I liked Katarina as a protagonist. I found her school-of-hard-knocks attitude coupled with her desperate desire to know herself and her place in the world to be really easy to sympathize with, and her POV was voiced snd readable. Her loyalty to her friends, as well as her desire to redeem her previously questionable actions, were demonstrated on page and thus easy to believe, and they made the plot Go™️ to boot! Excellent leading lady.
My main gripe is that I don’t love Kalos and Katarina for each other. Or rather, I don’t love him for her. It took far too long for him to get on board with being in love with her, and she spent far too long after her feelings had grown allowing him to keep her in that awful limbo of “we’re in a situationship but I’m literally having your baby”. I love a good groveling when an imbalance of feelings-timing happens and leads to someone getting hurt, but it happens too little and too late for my tastes. There’s a part where Kalos asks Rina
I did think the steamy scenes were really hot, and I appreciated the lore given to the world at large (Fae gates! Monster babies! New info on the council and on the seedy underbelly of the magical world!) and the set up for the next book (marriage of convenience! Bickering to lovers!), but I don’t think I’ll be returning to this installment.
Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao
adventurous
hopeful
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Watermoon is one of those stories that’s told to you in a whisper but echoes loudly in your mind whenever you have a quiet moment to think about it. The prose is beautiful from jump, absolutely alluring. It feels like getting swept up by a very calm river, where you think you can emerge whenever you want, but the current runs deep and won’t let you go until it says so.
I appreciated that the story was quick to act on its premise. Our protagonist Hana only gets a few pages of explaining the status quo of her world before her father’s disappearance turns it all on its head. She’s an insider to the world of her pawnshop; she knows how things work, and coupling her with the eternal outsider Kei allows her to show off the whimsicality and darkness of it in turn. As a reader, I was given an immediate example of how the pawned regrets look mundane to untrained eyes, but when seen by someone in the know are breathtaking and magical and precious. The reveals of Hana and Kei’s identities as products of those regrets, of choices made or not made, were made more poignant by this fact; Hana knew what Kei was from the moment she saw him, but couldn’t recognize the truth of herself until it was pointed out to her.
I enjoyed both Hana and Kei’s perspectives as the story shifted between them both, and not only for the way their respective insider/outsider dynamics shaped the framing of, for example, traveling though puddles or floating on clouds of paper cranes. Each of them offered a very pragmatic yet hopeful perspective on the world and their central goals were always clear and the primary drivers of the plot. Though the search for Hana’s father (and for her mother’s fate) was what made the protagonists move through the story, what I found most appealing was the growth they did individually. While messy, it was satisfying to watch their mirrored emotional arcs of 1. Mommy issues and 2. Feeling at the whim of or abandoned by fate resolve into a complicated equilibrium of “I don’t know if making choices is easy but I still want to try”. Though I didn’t buy their romance at first, by the end of the story I was very much rooting for Hana and Kei’s ability to be happy together.
I am a little miffed we didn’t get more clarity on what Hana did in the five years that separated her and Kei, I understand why it was left out. Rebuilding a society after its core tenets are shaken up is fodder for a whole different book, one the author wasn’t telling in this story.
The parts of Watermoon that will stay with me most strongly are the feelings it left me with. I felt sad for the clients of the pawnshop who never get to come back for what they pawned, not only that they can’t see the true value of their regret but that they forget they could come back even for something they consider worthless. I spent quite some time (before learning that a regret was a piece of a soul) thinking about what if anything I would pawn, what burdens I have that are too heavy, and I’ve decided I don’t have any. Heavy as they are they’re mine. Having that instinct rewarded by the narrative was satisfying, as was seeing those choices become something magical and special on their own.
I recommend Watermoon to fans of shows like Midnight Diner, where character internalize takes center stage, lovers of stories they have to work for, that appear quiet until you look at them more closely. It’s a novel made for people who like to feel as though they’ve discovered something special and hold it close to their hearts.
I appreciated that the story was quick to act on its premise. Our protagonist Hana only gets a few pages of explaining the status quo of her world before her father’s disappearance turns it all on its head. She’s an insider to the world of her pawnshop; she knows how things work, and coupling her with the eternal outsider Kei allows her to show off the whimsicality and darkness of it in turn. As a reader, I was given an immediate example of how the pawned regrets look mundane to untrained eyes, but when seen by someone in the know are breathtaking and magical and precious. The reveals of
I enjoyed both Hana and Kei’s perspectives as the story shifted between them both, and not only for the way their respective insider/outsider dynamics shaped the framing of, for example, traveling though puddles or floating on clouds of paper cranes. Each of them offered a very pragmatic yet hopeful perspective on the world and their central goals were always clear and the primary drivers of the plot. Though the search for Hana’s father (and for her mother’s fate) was what made the protagonists move through the story, what I found most appealing was the growth they did individually. While messy, it was satisfying to watch their mirrored emotional arcs of 1. Mommy issues and 2. Feeling at the whim of or abandoned by fate resolve into a complicated equilibrium of “I don’t know if making choices is easy but I still want to try”. Though I didn’t buy their romance at first, by the end of the story I was very much rooting for Hana and Kei’s ability to be happy together.
I am a little miffed we didn’t get more clarity on what Hana did in the
The parts of Watermoon that will stay with me most strongly are the feelings it left me with. I felt sad for the clients of the pawnshop who never get to come back for what they pawned, not only that they can’t see the true value of their regret but that they forget they could come back even for something they consider worthless. I spent quite some time (before
I recommend Watermoon to fans of shows like Midnight Diner, where character internalize takes center stage, lovers of stories they have to work for, that appear quiet until you look at them more closely. It’s a novel made for people who like to feel as though they’ve discovered something special and hold it close to their hearts.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Death of parent
The Woman in Me by Britney Spears
emotional
hopeful
informative
fast-paced
A heartfelt insight into one of the most scrutinized public figures of the modern world. I am so honored to live in a world where Britney can speak for herself about the way she was treated not just by her abusive father/within her conservatorship, but by the misogynistic music industry and the toxic news/media landscape of the ‘90s and ‘00s (and, let’s be honest, the past two decades as well). Of course any memoir will be biased in favor of the one writing it, but given the years of conservatorship under which she was silenced, and given the charisma with which she recalls her naïveté and openheartedness even as she admits to bad and silly behavior, makes me just so thrilled to have read this book.
Spears is a natural entertainer, and it comes through in prose as easily as it does through song and dance. I believe her love for her children. I believe her pain when recounting the ways her former lovers and family hurt her. If she never writes another song or goes on another tour, I will believe that is what’s best for her, because I believe that she is the best person to decide that for herself.
Spears is a natural entertainer, and it comes through in prose as easily as it does through song and dance. I believe her love for her children. I believe her pain when recounting the ways her former lovers and family hurt her. If she never writes another song or goes on another tour, I will believe that is what’s best for her, because I believe that she is the best person to decide that for herself.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body shaming, Bullying, Confinement, Emotional abuse, Misogyny, Forced institutionalization, Medical trauma, and Gaslighting
The Cousins by Karen M. McManus
funny
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
I always know I’m gonna have fun with a McManus title, even if it doesn’t capture my memory as easily as it does my attention. I love stories about family drama and the decadence of the wealthy falling into disrepair and ruin (hello, Gothic undertones to the theme!), and this story had just enough of that at the core of it to keep me turning pages. Aubrey and her uncle (easily the moral centers of the story), and Milly (easily the shit stirrer who makes things happen) are my favorite members of the family by far, and I’m a big fan of Jonah’s snarky attitude (at least, fake Jonah, who isn’t a cousin but has the financial incentive from the real one to come to the island for the summer) . The kids didn’t do much actual investigating into the Odd Circumstances surrounding their invitation to the island and the weird things they find out when there, which is disappointing as I prefer my thriller NS mystery protagonists to take a much more active role in figuring stuff out, but the dual timelines and the more inquisitive side characters giving info to them (my least favorite method of revelations) kept me reading. The ending twist was over the top and very fun, and the post-ending twist revealing that the impersonators had spent all the family money and there wasn’t any inheritance left was super satisfying in that schadenfreude way. The real wealth was the new family ties built along the way.
Not one I’ll be revisiting, but a super fun way to spend a day.
Not one I’ll be revisiting, but a super fun way to spend a day.
Orconomics: A Satire by J. Zachary Pike
adventurous
emotional
funny
lighthearted
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
I did not expect to get got by the D&D/TTRPG satire book. I signed on for a silly, goofy time and apparently missed the fine print where the critique of late-stage capitalism, and the racism and ableism and etc that stem from it, overtake the fun acronyms (if a shadowkin gets their non-combatant paperwork they become an NPC! How fun!) and make you feel like an absolute fool for not looking at them more seriously in the first place (hey, isn’t it fucked up that there’s whole groups of people who need special papers to avoid being killed outright, and have their murders cause someone else’s career advancement?). Except it’s not fine print, it’s all the print, and it only begins to feel serious when you see the consequences of it taken to their greatest extreme. And isn’t that the most messed up bit, that you need to see someone die who you care about before it matters enough for you to pay attention?
So yeah. I got got by the D&D satire book. Which kind of mirrors the experience of starting to play D&D, where after having a good fun time with friends for a while, the story you’re telling together begins to Matter So Much Actually.
And like with real D&D, the heart of the mattering lies with the characters. I really enjoyed following Gorm, washed up grizzled old adventurer that he was. Following a lead who’s been screwed by the system but also knows it inside out let Pike provide information on the world (and the way it takes both fantasy and RPG tropes and takes them to their furthest logical conclusion, rather than handwaving some less than savory elements) succinctly and with a humorous voice. Gorm’s desire to return to his people and to the role in society that he used to occupy is sensical, as is his desire not to be killed for breaking guild rules after being kicked out. His friendship with Gleebek or rather, Tib’rin the goblin and the rest of the reluctant Seven Heroes of al’Matra made for my quick fondness for the party, and I especially liked that even at the start of his character arc, he was recognizing the terrible conditions that shadowkin live under.
The POV chapters we got for Kaitha the ranger, the two rival mages Laruna and Jynn, and Niln the cleric/prophet who brought them all together were also really neat insights into the internal journeys of other people in this world and married into the plot well. But my favorite chapters were the ones we got from the POV of Poldo, a high ranking accountant interacting with The Great Players of this whole system (those in power, so literally The King, The Celebrity-Adventurer, The Bank, and The Adventurer’s Guild Leaders), where hints to the Real Story and reason behind the fetch-quest-turned liche battle and cultural reparations adventure were meted out just enough to be unsettling and add complexity to what would otherwise be an overly formulaic plot (though, of course, that’s also kind of the point!).
Actually, that’s not true. I most loved being in the POV of the orc chief, getting to see the quality of Tib’rin firsthand. When they’re all killed, I did cry. I was furious right alongside Gorm.
Did I see the end coming? Not really. Not to that extent. I really did think Pike would keep the satire easy to swallow and keep his violence cartoony and easy to overlook and… I don’t know, just easy. And then, it wasn’t easy, and things mattered, and this book jumped from a happy-but-forgettable 3 to sitting in my feelings as a solid 4 stars and being a book I’ll keep thinking about for quite some time. I thought this was a stand-alone when I picked it up, so I’m thrilled I have two whole volumes to go before finishing this story.
So yeah. I got got by the D&D satire book. Which kind of mirrors the experience of starting to play D&D, where after having a good fun time with friends for a while, the story you’re telling together begins to Matter So Much Actually.
And like with real D&D, the heart of the mattering lies with the characters. I really enjoyed following Gorm, washed up grizzled old adventurer that he was. Following a lead who’s been screwed by the system but also knows it inside out let Pike provide information on the world (and the way it takes both fantasy and RPG tropes and takes them to their furthest logical conclusion, rather than handwaving some less than savory elements) succinctly and with a humorous voice. Gorm’s desire to return to his people and to the role in society that he used to occupy is sensical, as is his desire not to be killed for breaking guild rules after being kicked out. His friendship with Gleebek
The POV chapters we got for Kaitha the ranger, the two rival mages Laruna and Jynn, and Niln the cleric/prophet who brought them all together were also really neat insights into the internal journeys of other people in this world and married into the plot well. But my favorite chapters were the ones we got from the POV of Poldo, a high ranking accountant interacting with The Great Players of this whole system (those in power, so literally The King, The Celebrity-Adventurer, The Bank, and The Adventurer’s Guild Leaders), where hints to the Real Story and reason behind the fetch-quest-turned
Actually, that’s not true. I most loved being in the POV of the orc
Did I see the end coming? Not really. Not to that extent. I really did think Pike would keep the satire easy to swallow and keep his violence cartoony and easy to overlook and… I don’t know, just easy. And then, it wasn’t easy, and things mattered, and this book jumped from a happy-but-forgettable 3 to sitting in my feelings as a solid 4 stars and being a book I’ll keep thinking about for quite some time. I thought this was a stand-alone when I picked it up, so I’m thrilled I have two whole volumes to go before finishing this story.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Drug abuse, Self harm, and Colonisation