magneticcrow's reviews
704 reviews

The Watchers by A.M. Shine

Welp. That sure felt like a novel that M. Night Shyamalan would adapt. I guess that’s what I can say for it. 

The Sins on Their Bones by Laura R. Samotin
Did not finish book. Stopped at 5%.

Everything about this book sounded so unbelievably up my alley: Queer! Jewish! Secondary World! Dark fantasy! I love all the authors who blurbed it. I am completely baffled by how hard and fast I bounced off of it, but I found the writing insufferable. 

Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak

meh. I need to learn better than to pick up books that are popular and 4+ stars on here, my tastes just don’t align. 😕 

The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon

This like if Evangelion was written by Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira) and was gay. 

Very good, definitely picking up everything Candon writes in the future. 

Can't Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne
Did not finish book. Stopped at 30%.

So many folks are pitching this book as “If you liked Legends & Lattes…” which, I see the similarities? Yeah it’s a lesbian romance set in a fantasy world where the fighter main character hangs up her sword to open a small shop and deals with the logistics of retail, rehabilitating a space, and disengaging from her messy past. 

But one critical difference…. L&L is well written, with engaging characters with clear and consistent characterization and growth, and logical plot points. Tea is… not. 

Just a laundry list of some of my issues, a few of them a hair spoilery for the 100 pages or so I managed to get through: 

The characterization is inconsistent, you can’t just *say* a character is one way and then have them act entirely a different way, that is not how decent characterization works. Like… is Kianthe shy and withdrawn or bubbly and outspoken? Is Reyna extroverted and charming or bristly and quiet? The author doesn’t know how to show what she’s telling, she goes to lengths to repeatedly describe the characters the first way then show them behaving the second.

The writing is crude, choppy, and redundant. World building is randomly dropped into the middle of action in a way that disrupts the flow and emotion of a sequence. This is a me problem, but I hate the world “Magicary” passionately. 

The little character description we get is both cringey and poorly executed. For example, Kianthe has “skin the color of drying clay” which is… what? white? grey? red? light brown? dark brown? yellow? seriously, what kind of clay are we talking about here? this isn’t even a good comparison, just say what color you mean. And then Reyna is just “paler”, which is also unhelpful. I thought we all agreed that describing a person of color’s skin by relating them to objects, and then either not describing the skin tone of white people or doing it in a way that reads as “theirs was normal though”, is bad. Real bad. 

The plot just makes so little sense, if we’re on the lam from a despotic and vengeful queen, why are we very publicly taking advantage of her anti-banditry incentive programs to obtain a storefront? I want to scream at these people.

I found myself dreading certain inevitable plot points instead of looking forward to them, hence the dnf. :\

Uranians by Theodore McCombs

Amazing collection, I cried. Beautifully done. 

Last Exit by Max Gladstone

I’m also a millennial, about a year off from Gladstone’s age, so I get that this is a very personal and heartfelt outpouring of his feelings about Black Lives Matter, flowing from having been through the Occupy protests and electing Obama and feeling like maybe we’d done things right but then nothing was fixed and things stayed dark. I get that. 

But I also wish a brave editor had been willing to cut like…30% off the long internal monologues of each of the characters. There’s a lot that’s good in this book, and a lot of wonderful ideas and images, but… it’s so bogged down and repetitive that it’s hard to enjoy the ride.   

Hospital by Han Song

This was extremely disjointed especially near the end, it really felt as if the author was making it up as he went. It had some interesting ideas packed in there, and I do like a non traditional narrative structure usually, but it’s hard to get around the sexism and like, the main character having sex with a teenager while envisioning his own preteen daughter. 😬 yeah I finished it somehow but this is the end of the series for me 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Chronic illness, Pedophilia, Vomit, and Medical trauma

The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd
Did not finish book. Stopped at 31%.

I’m not finding this particularly interesting, which for a book about maps and cartographers and libraries and magic is surprising. In part, it really feels like the author hasn’t done a lot of research? I don’t feel like I’m learning much, it seems very imprecise and vibey, like other than learning the name of the database of maps there’s been nothing specific to cartography or cartographic restoration. My own background includes printmaking, and I feel like even I know more about the field than has been discussed here.

Also I simply can’t understand or believe the severity of the “junk box incident”. I can understand why her dad might have ruined her career to push her away from something mystical and dangerous, but not why other professionals in the field would take it seriously without that context or why she would either.

I was ambivalent about the book of M too, so probably this author simply isn’t for me. 

Afterlife: Ghost Stories from Goa by Jessica Faleiro

Well, I learned some things about the history of Goa. I can say that about it.