ohmage_resistance's reviews
75 reviews

adventurous emotional funny fast-paced

This was a good sequel to the first book in the series!

The worldbuilding in this one was much better imo. The sci fi worldbuilding felt way clearer and less confusing than book 1, which was a huge improvement (that was my only real issue with book 1). On the other hand, the Ethiopian cultural details (like the MC eating injera and tibs, mentioning Ge'ez script, etc) were still present, although there was a little less referencing Ethiopian history (besides the Aksum Empire references). Also, I really liked hearing Ethiopian accents for the audiobook.

It was as nice to see Yared develop as a character a bit more. He's still somewhat arrogant (in a way that comes across as funny rather than annoying), but in this book he learns to be more responsible, especially with his privileges that come with being recognized as a prince. This did require him to make some mistakes first (I always get secondhand embarrassment with that sort of thing), but luckily, once I got past the beginning and the plot started in earnest that didn't happen again. The side characters also played well off Yared.

The plot is once again pretty fast paced, with a few twists later on. I'm an adult, so not the target audience for this book, but I can see it working well for a middle grade audience.

Content Warnings

The Bone Ships by RJ Barker

Go to review page

adventurous tense slow-paced

This book was pretty decent, but I think I liked Gods of the Wyrdwood more.

The real strength of this book is the worldbuilding. Most of the world is covered in ocean, with islands poking out, which are constantly at war with one another. There's no trees (and therefore no wood) to make boats out, so people make ships out of the bones of sea dragons. It also seems like childbirth is really common in this world (infertility, stillbirths, deformities, and deaths of mothers are all really common). Instead of talking this a sort of Handmaid's Tale direction, Barker decided that this culture would highly value women who gave birth multiple times without their children having any deformities, and that they would be political leaders as well. This wasn't a huge focus (most of the book is spent on an isolated boat away from any island), but that matriarchal attitude does carry through some wordchoice and stuff like that (people will say "women and men" instead of "men and women", etc).

That being said, I do have a few critiques of the worldbuilding. In a world where sea dragon bone is really rare, and therefore ships are really valuable, it feels very odd to me that the culture would just put a bunch of convicts on a ship to die with basically no oversight. Like, that seems like a really great way to loose a ship as people defect. Even if that ship is seen as unlucky, it's worth something. The culture also practices a lot of child sacrifice for good luck, but they specifically sacrifice firstborn children without deformities whose mothers survived their birth. I know it's religion and all, so it's not going to be super practical, but still, if abled bodied adults from good bloodlines seem relatively rare, why would you sacrifice those children (I'm not pro child sacrifice at all obviously, it just seems illogical and kind of gives me mixed messages about how difficult childbirth is actually on this world. Like how common is it for a woman to become bern?). This isn't a criticism, but I'll also note that the main culture is pretty ableist, as you might be able to tell from the previous paragraph, although disabled people are common.

The main downside to the book is that the author comes across as being a little bit too in love with his worldbuilding in the first part of the book, and by that I mean that the pacing is really slow and the focus is on the worldbuilding at the expense of the plot. (I thought that Gods of the Wyrdwood didn't have this issue at all, which is why I liked it better). IDKl, if you're really into navel fantasy specifically, I can see this not bothering you, but if you have low patience for that sort of thing, know that going in. Even when the plot starts, it's a lot of sea battles and stuff, which didn't quite totally grab me (I don't think I"m that into navel fantasy, ngl).

The characters grew on me over the course of the book. I liked Joron's development from being kind of a directionless drunk to being a good first mate in his crew. I liked Meas's character, although she was a little distant, and the Guillaume and Farys were probably my two favorites.

I will probably continue reading this series at some point (especially because I think the other books will probably have better pacing if they're a bit more chill on getting worldbuilding info across), but I'm not in a huge hurry to do it.

Content Warnings

Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho

Go to review page

emotional

This was a really good short story collection. Most stories follow ideas about just modern, generally pretty relatable problems but with some Malaysian fantasy twist. The stories generally featured a lot of female characters with a focus on generally on family dynamics (especially between female family members) or sometimes romance (both lesbian, straight, and F/NB). It sometimes got a little too heavy on the romance for me, but I suspect that won't bother a lot of other people,

A lot of the stories and especially the dialogue were written with Malaysian English or with phrases of Malay, Mandarin, or other languages occasionally appearing. Props to Emily Woo Zeller for doing a good job bring this all to life with the audiobook (I personally can't comment on the accuracy, but other reviews who are more informed culturally seem to think she did a good job).

Only a few stories didn't work for me. The worst one imo was "The Earth Spirit’s Favorite Anecdote" where

the eventual love interest of the MC did some pretty terrible things like sending people to invade the MC's home. No, no remorse for this was shown

I mean, I liked the MC's narration, but that wasn't enough to make up for the spoilered stuff. "Liyana" also wasn't my favorite, although I'll give it credit for being

creepy and tragic with that twist

On the other hand, I'm having trouble listing particularly good ones because there's just too many that are all well written and meaningful that it's hard to single any out. I particularly liked "The Fishbowl", "The House of Aunts",

“The Mystery of the Suet Swain”, “The Perseverance of Angela’s Past Life”, and “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again"

Content Warnings

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett

Go to review page

adventurous funny medium-paced

This book was pretty decent. I don't think I have much to complain about, it just didn't really completely grab me. It is interesting to compare this to Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books, the other Discworld books meant for kids, because Tiffany Aching feels much more targeted towards that audience.

Content Warnings

Witches of Fruit and Forest by K.A. Cook

Go to review page

adventurous hopeful

This is a collection of fairytale inspired aromantic stories. Some of these stories were rereads for me, a few of them were new. Overall, I like the way KA Cook covers aro themes, but I think I prefer collections centered around common aro experiences (ie non partnering aros, aro allos, etc) rather than ones centered around a common setting from this author. I generally liked this though. I also like Cook's take on Witches as being very queer and not really fitting into society, and I think ze strikes a good balance between characters who find leaving an oppressive society behind empowering vs acknowledging the reason why they had to leave was because of oppression (which doesn't go away), so it didn't feel just like cheap empowerment wish fulfillment that sometimes these sorts of stories come across as to me.

Content Warnings

The Sunforge by Sascha Stronach

Go to review page

adventurous challenging

So I didn't really have the best time with this book for a couple of reasons. Number one is that it's been a while since I read book one, so I had a bit of trouble remembering character names and roles. Number two is that this book did some very experimental stuff with timelines and surrealist mind trips and stuff like that. If book one was more like Perdido Street Station, this one was more like Archive Undying. I think I'm getting to the point where I'm realizing that books that are experimental for experimental's sake don't really work for me. Experimental because it works with the themes really well, I enjoy that (shoutout to The Spear Cuts Through Water), but books that are hard to follow just because, yeah, at a certain point the work to reward ration just isn't there (I should clarify that there are some themes here about colonization and oppression, they just aren't really meaningfully benefited by the way the book is written). There was even a nuclear reactor and I couldn't even tell what was going on with that (to the point where it was unclear whether it was a fusion or fission reactor (fission makes a lot more sense (because fusion reactors don't work like that), but they would occasionally talk about it like a fusion reactor plus that makes more sense for the title, IDK, and sometimes it was treated more like a bomb instead)), and I know more about nuclear reactors than your average person. Number three is that the audiobook is the wrong choice for this one. I find keeping track of characters and timelines harder in audiobooks, so I think if I were to try this book again, I would definitely try to read it with my eyes. But I honestly would recommend this for anyone, if only so that you can avoid listening to the narrator say "Then she drowned" at least a hundred times (another experimental writing choice that didn't really work.) Overall, I thought about maybe retrying this one with an ebook, but honestly, I don't think I enjoyed it enough to put in even more work to better understand the plot. Book 1 was still kind of trippy but to a way lower extent and was much better.

Content Warnings

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Go to review page

adventurous

This book wasn't bad, but I didn't love it. Which makes sense, because I feel like I'm just too young, too American, and too uninterested in classics to really be the target audience for this book. I haven't read Jane Eyre, and I also tend not to be the biggest fan of books that get meta about people's love of reading. I'm also pretty uninvested in the concept of (romantic) Happily Ever Afters, so the romance subplot didn't really work for me (nor did the

Jane Eyre plot

). Also, this isn't the fault of the book, but the focus on the Crimean War just reminded me of the current war in Ukraine. So the MC was like "we need to end this war and let Russia take the region over" and I was like, ok, so that makes sense historically for the Crimean War context but also like, that's not really a message I want to hear in the context of the current war in Ukraine.

IDK, I'm complaining a lot, but it wasn't a bad book, and I had an ok time with it. I don't think I'll continue with the series for the reasons I listed above (the "I'm too young, too American, and too uninterested in classics to really be the target audience for this book" part).

Content Warnings

So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole

Go to review page

adventurous medium-paced

Yeah, this book didn't quite work for me. The beginning was better, but once the two main plotlines started, I wasn't super interested in either. Faron had this really annoying plotline of "should I trust this obviously super sketchy figure that everyone tells me not to trust. I probably shouldn't. He's such a bad boy though and I have literally nothing else to do, so I think I'm going to trust him."

Surprise, he's evil and she shouldn't have trusted him. Who could have seen that coming? But of course it needs to be written that way, because the author needs to create conflict somehow for the next book, and that can't happen organically.

Anyway, I never like those sorts of plotlines. I was also a little weird because I think they kind of depend on the MC being attracted to the bad boy that they shouldn't trust, but this book like kinda half reads as a love triangle with Faron, the bad boy, and Reeve (Faron's actual love interest) but half doesn't because Faron is demi so there's no reason why she should be attracted to the bad boy love interest.

Again, doesn't really make sense to me, but probably works as a setup for book 2

. Elara's plotline is going to fantasy!English dragon school. I feel like this was speed through so fast that a lot of it lost impact and was poorly defined. Honestly, if you want a book that slows down and actually explores the concept of a girl going to a dragon riding school run by her colonizers, just read To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose. The commentary on racism, colonization and empire is also way better thought out there. Where in this book, you have things like apparently people standing over Elara's bed with a knife being casually mentioned as a racist threat she faced, her getting into a contest to defeat a racist bully who called her a slur (which I get it is bad, but it's not threatening her life), to half of her classmates and teachers, almost none of which she has an actual on page relationship with, caring enough about her to go to

war on her behalf against their own country

. There is absolutely no connecting tissue between any of that. A lot of the commentary on racism and colonization is just "something that bad people do" and not really critically looking at how they form systems of oppression, which is why this book's take on it feels very like simplified fiction rather than realistic or grounded commentary.

Content Warnings

The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills

Go to review page

This book didn't land for me. There's kind of commentary on three different things here: extremist/high demand religious groups, the rise of fascism/political extremism, and an abusive mentor-mentee relationship. But really, it was mostly just looking at cults/high demand religious groups and the rise of fascism/political extremism through the lens of an abusive mentor-mentee relationship—which didn't work for me because those are different types of dynamics. There's similarities for sure, but there's also some important differences that Mills just ignores, which made the book's themes feel much, much weaker for me.

The biggest and most obvious difference is that an abusive mentor-mentee relationship is a one on one relationship, where cults and fascism are both social movements. Yes, they might have leaders, but they involve a lot more people in general, so the dynamics are different. Those leaders don't individually go to every follower and have toxic interpersonal relationships with them, they play people off of each other. They normalize extreme behavior/worldviews because everyone else is doing it. If I understand them correctly, cults prey on people’s desire for community/to belong, and the extreme lengths people will go to get that community. Yes, sometimes people can be ostracized/cut off from community in a cult, but that only works as a punishment because that sense of community is so strong that people are willing to do anything to “earn” their way back into it, otherwise it doesn't work. I’m mostly focusing on cult stuff here, but this is also how facsism/political extremism works—it’s social, it reinforces an in-group worldview (and cuts people off from outside worldviews, which are seen as threats), it relies on people forming a group identity not just by having a relationship with a strongman leader, but with each other as well. Even if we take the example of the far right in the US, it doesn't work just because of Trump, it works because Trump can act as a focal point for a certain group identity (MAGA) to form around. Zenya (the MC) is never part of a community, she is always an outsider. At first it’s because she comes from a scholar background, then it was because she’s too much of Vodaya’s (her mentor's) favorite, then it’s because she had a breakdown, etc. We never really see her form close bonds outside of with Vodaya (I mean, we supposedly hear that she had some sort of bond with a character she mentored, but we don’t really see that. She’s also not close to her wing-mates or whatever it was called.). The only reason she’s in the Winged is because she has a close relationship to Vodaya, she wants to protect people, and she likes flying. That’s it. She doesn't have any sort of a group identity or desire for community, because she doesn't get community from the Winged. She does get a relationship to Vodaya, but one relationship does not a community make.

I'm also going to add in, it didn't help that I didn’t buy Zemolai/Zenya as a religious character for a single second. This is relatively common for me—I grew up in a rather religious environment surrounded by other religious people (although not super extreme), and I think there’s a lot of subtle nuances to being in that sort of situation that authors (especially ones who have a more secular background) seem to really struggle to portray, at least imo. Most of the time this doesn’t bother me so much, I just ignore it, but in a book where so much of the plot depended on the MC’s (supposed) relationship to her religion, yeah, it felt super jarring to me when it didn’t really feel like she actually had a real, meaningful relationship to her religion. That plotline just fell flat, and that’s the most important plot line in the book. It kind of just felt like Zemolai remembered that she was supposed to care about the gods whenever it was convenient for the plot, but it just didn't exist in her world view or sense of identity at all beyond that. Like for example, right before the final conflict, she goes to a shrine to pray (because it's important that she's religious for the final conflict, which is part of the plot) and says she hasn't prayed in a while. Presumably this was to show the stress she was in from kind of deprogramming herself. Except, she hadn't prayed at all for the entire book until this point, praying just wasn't a part of her character at all. Again, she's only religious when it's plot relevant. I'll also add in here, organized religion is also inherently social and communal, so a lot of my sense of "she's not religious" was probably tied into the above stuff as well.

There were a lot of circumstances where I felt pretty distant to the main character or like a distant style was being used. The exception to this was the scenes of abuse from the mentor figure, which I thought were well written and powerful (later on when were were being shown Vodaya being abusive, not just being told about it). That being said, there was a lot mostly in the "honeymoon phase" sort of part of entering the warrior sect that felt skimmed over (see also the point about Zenya never really feeling like she belonged or honestly felt that happy). Also the deprogramming/deradicalization arc also felt pretty distant in similar ways, we don't see a sort of desperate hopelessness or sense of loss of community, because Zemolai never had one.

Overall, I wasn't really sold by the character work, and the plot wasn't enough to interest me when the characters and themes weren't working for me. So basically, if you're looking for a book about an abusive mentor mentee relationship, this might work. If you want commentary on extremism in political or religious groups, uh, don't expect much.

Content Warnings

Until the Last Petal Falls by Viano Oniomoh

Go to review page

hopeful lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character

I'm generally a fan of aromantic fairytale retellings. This one was pretty good, but a little bit less up my alley than I was hoping.

On the positive side, it was nice to see how the author changed details about The Beauty and the Beast to better fit the Nigerian setting. On the other hand... one of my least favorite tropes, as an aromantic person is the "(romantic) love makes you human"/humanizing power of (romantic) love trope (you might be able to tell why I don't like the original The Beauty and the Beast story very much). This book subverted the assumption that it's romantic love that has that humanizing power (which is nice) but it did it by replacing romantic love with queerplatonic love. That’s not actually as huge of an improvement as it could have been and is still going to feel alienating to some a-specs who feel like they can’t have or don’t want a QPR or a romantic relationship. Basically, it feels like the core premise of what was bothering me, as an a-spec person, about The Beauty and the Beast was still there, which isn't what I generally hope for in an aro fairytale retelling. IDK, I probably should have guessed it was going this way based on the start, and I don't want to blame the author much because it's not like QPR stories couldn't use more rep, but those are my feelings about it.

Also, this story was a little bit too far on the sappy side of things for me personally, but that's just my personal taste. But other than that, I enjoyed the book, with the characters and their struggles. Also, I liked the shout out to Raybearer (as a Nigerian inspired fantasy book with ace rep), that’s sweet.

Content Warnings

More...

ohmage_resistance's reviews 75 reviews

ohmage_resistance's reviews
75 reviews