wordswritinstarlight's reviews
177 reviews

Wolfsong by TJ Klune

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adventurous dark emotional funny hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense medium-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

5.0

I cried more reading this book than I probably have in literal years.  I loved Ox as a main character, and watching him grow into himself left me extremely emotionally compromised.  This book has everything you could conceivably want in this sort of magical realism setting, and it’s all set on a backdrop of Found Family Super Deluxe Edition that really did it for me.  I’m haunting my wife daily to take the next one as soon as she’s done with it.

Recommended without reservation, but especially if you watched Teen Wolf and went “what if this was…good, and made sense, and also made me gently weep multiple times.”
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The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown

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dark mysterious sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot

4.0

This novella isn’t reinventing the space horror wheel, but it does a very respectable job at what it’s trying to do and I like that in a book.  Jack is a great protagonist in the vein of Ellen Ripley, and setting the story on a ship trying to go back to Earth from a failed colony was a fun take on the familiar generational ship concept.  This book read like nothing so much as a love story to space operas, horror or otherwise—I clocked at least five different nods to various things, including two separate Star Treks (Stars Trek?  Voyager and The Wrath of Khan).  Good monsters, well-thought-out sci-fi pseudoscience, and multiple explosive decompressions, which is really all I’m looking for in this kind of thing.

Recommended to lovers of Alien, the Year of Hell Star Trek: Voyager episodes, and watching every conceivable problem happen onscreen at the same time.
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Vita Nostra by Sergey Dyachenko, Marina Dyachenko

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 30%.
Look. Okay. This book is beautifully written. I am listening to it on 1.5x speed and I still feel like I 1) have not encountered real plot and 2) keep almost falling asleep. This is a lovely book and I simply cannot hang with it.
Providence Girls by Morgan Dante

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes

4.0

A bittersweet but lovely romance, equal parts sad and beautiful.  Azzie and Vin are wonderful reworkings of Lovecraft’s characters, especially since his female characters are notoriously (in the most generous terms) questionable.  Their stories are fleshed out and given some dimension in Providence Girls, with a kind of even-handed awfulness that vibes well with the usual Lovecraftian nightmare reality—everyone here has experienced something terrible, and it’s equal parts supernatural and aggressively mundane.  I do wish the book had gone a little more into Asenath’s story; I think there’s a lot of potentially interesting material in the issue of the Innsmouth “brides” and Azzie’s father’s rampant sexism, to say nothing of the whole…Asenath situation.  On the other hand, I’m also familiar enough with the source material to know that there’s a lot more concrete material to work with in The Dunwich Horror and Lavinia’s fairly wretched situation, so I don’t hold any grudges.  I would love to read more of this author’s take on the Lovecraft universe, if they ever decided to write more in this setting, though!

Now, I read this book as part of my eternal quest for books about gay people loving monsters, and I would give it a solid B grade on that front.  Azzie’s gradual slide into
losing her humanity and becoming a Deep One
is profoundly tragic, but Vin’s sincere affection and fearlessness throughout is extremely sweet.  I would have liked to see more of their story after
Azzie’s transformation,
rather than the handful of snapshots we get, though.  Honestly I kind of wanted more of the “horror” in the “horror romance” (I would put it at about a 4 out of 10 on horror elements) and some terrifying inhuman deep sea creatures would have done me just right.  Overall, though, a beautifully written romance, and a great example of my personal favorite sub genre of horror, which is “Lovecraftian Horror That Would Have Given Lovecraft A Rage-Induced Stroke”.

As a side note, my only real criticism on a technical level is that this is an epistolary novel and largely in the second person, which is fine and beautifully executed but clearly was not the original draft—there are a handful of places where pronouns slip up and stop being addressed to “you” and return to third-person “she/her/etc.”  As ever, this kind of error is an easy thing to miss and not a dire problem, I’m just literally paid as an editor and I notice this sort of thing whether I’m looking for it or not.

Recommended for other people in the market for anti-Lovecraft Lovecraftian horror or for people who enjoy an introspective modern rewrite of classic stories, like A Dowry of Blood by ST Gibson.
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Spectr: Volume 2 by Jordan L. Hawk

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adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Actually I fucking love these books!  I think every urban fantasy setting should include realistic discussions of prejudice and observational biases, and also eldritch Venom creatures riding along in their boyfriend’s brain.
The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies by Dawn Raffel

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emotional funny informative inspiring slow-paced

5.0

I love weird medical history and “baby shows on Coney Island” is a sentence I was immediately on board for, so I’ll admit that I wasn’t hard to win over with this one.  That being said, the author does a great job of balancing equal parts humor and sincerity, which I think Dr. Couney would have appreciated under the circumstances.  This book is almost as much about her struggle to actually find the information she includes as it is about the information itself, and both sides of the story paint a very warm, fond picture of tenuous human connections becoming literally life-saving.  I was totally fine through the whole book and then at the end (literally the last pages) the author discusses
a woman who she met and spoke to about Dr. Couney—the woman died at 98, and was buried with her identical twin, who had lived less than 20 minutes.
And I’ll admit that that made me cry a little.

Recommended for people interested in weird stories about medical advancements being soundly rejected.  Do you know who Ignaz Semmelweis is?  If yes, you will like this book.  Alternatively, if you read the Poisoner’s Handbook, I think this appeals to a similar crowd.
Prince's Gambit by C.S. Pacat

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adventurous dark emotional lighthearted reflective sad tense 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

5.0

God DAMN I love these books.  Genuinely one of my favorite romance series of all time.  This book is a great balance between action and emotional beats—CS Pacat writes a great battle scene, but doesn’t get swept away in the grand tactics so much that the one-on-one dynamics are forgotten.  Damen and Laurent falling together and discovering that they can honestly rely on each other and trust each other more than their own people, in a lot of ways, fucking GETS me every time.  I am incredibly emotional about Laurent in this book, learning to let himself care about people again while he’s dealing with objectively the worst case scenario.  God I love these books.  Fucking modern classics.

Also, this book has that scene with Damen killing a guy in one hit by throwing a broadsword like a madman, and it’s maybe my favorite scene in the whole series.
Nirvana In Fire (Manhua) 01 by Hai Yan

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mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

4.0

This is definitely a scheming-heavy book, and this first volume does a lot of setup, which made it feel slow in some places, but I had a good time reading it and I’m interested to see all that setup pay off in future volumes.  I like the characters—the main character and his baby guard are intolerably sweet together—and I do enjoy some good solid schemery, so I’m fully on board.  Additionally, the art is super beautiful, although you need to pay some very acute attention to everyone’s collars in order to keep people straight because everyone has very similar hairstyles.

I’m reserving judgement on who to recommend this to until I’m further into the actual plot, because “has scheming” is a pretty broad category and that’s most of what I’ve got a handle on thus far.
Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

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adventurous emotional hopeful mysterious tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

I read this book for the first time, lo, these many years ago (in high school), and honestly I don’t think I gave it a fair shake at the time.  It’s a pretty slow build to the action, and I have a much better tolerance for slow builds since I got on some ADHD medication, which probably accounts for the difference.  This time around, I really loved it, and I’m excited to read the next one.

Recommended for people who are looking for a weird magic system (teeth!) and for people who want some REAL “we are on opposite sides of a war” enemies-to-lovers content.
Remnants of Filth: Yuwu (Novel) Vol. 5 by Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes

5.0

This book made me SEVERELY emotional about Gu Mang.  God I just want nice things for him.  The previous volume was the Mo Xi Crying Hour and this one is the Gu Mang Crying Hour.  No notes.