zillanovikov's reviews
65 reviews

Darknesses by Lachelle Seville

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful 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

I devoured this book. It took me three days, which is less time than it took the characters to eat each other, but it was worth my very limited patience to see them fall completely in love.

There is a very specific genre, which may or may not have a name - don't ask me - about abuse survivors who find people who love them entire, scars and all, and make a found family to replace what blood denied them. Think Black Jewels Trilogy. I am a connoisseur of these novels. I consider the best of the genre to be the stories allow the survivors space to be angry, to refuse to forgive the unforgivable, to seek revenge on the perpetrators and the complicit. We need space for rage. We need to be loved in our righteous anger as well as our self-hated. Lachelle's book savours revenge like a fine red wine. All will end well, it promises you. The broken can be loved. The wicked can be punished. Both will be glorious.

In a world where the angels don't protect you, it's a great comfort to think the devil and her friends have your back.

Airy Nothing by Clarissa Pattern

adventurous emotional hopeful 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

 This is a story about two kinds of loneliness. John has no place in his village, can't conform to their ideas of gender, can't admit what he sees, friendless and alone. Jack is welcomed across the mean streets of London, easily befriends strangers, but trusts no one and knows no one should trust him. Jack knows how to walk away and bury the pain, except that he can't walk away from John.

Jack and John are both survivors. Jack knows that the way to survive is to do whatever it takes to be ready for the winter, and to bury the dead quickly in your mind. John has magic, the kind of magic misfits and rejects conjure so their minds can escape the pain that their bodies and souls endure. Only in this story, the faeries he sees are real, or real enough. The village is spitefully cruel and the streets of London are anonymously cruel, but he has a way to survive which lets him still be kind, and he is determined to share it with Jack.

I fell in love with both of them. 

Sushi and Sea Lions by Rachel Corsini

emotional hopeful inspiring lighthearted medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Sushi and Sea Lions is a romance with heart. Dany thinks she's lost everything when an injury takes away her ability to dance ballet professionally. But ballet is a complicated thing to love. It gave her the ability to fly, but it demanded perfection from her in return. She had a body she didn't love and a boyfriend who didn't really love her. It's only when she's lost both ballet and the toxic boyfriend that she can start to find herself.

In Queens, she meets an old friend, Vincent, who's going through his own journey of self discovery. She teaches him to bark at sea lions and play video games and smile, and he teaches her that she is worthy of love, just as she is, imperfections and all.

This is a romance, but it's not just Dany falling in love with her Vin Vin. It's also Dany falling in love with herself, and learning to fly again on her own terms. 

The Pink and the Blue by I. Merey

emotional reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Merey's books lodge themselves in my heart, take up residence somewhere near the left auricle, leave me breathless and internally bleeding. His books are raw and visceral and they hurt like memory.

The characters in The Pink and the Blue are drawn in their truest sense, sometimes so transparent that you can see the city through their outlines, sometimes melting off the page, sometimes with limbs scattered around the bedroom. It's body horror, but the horror is that it reflects a reality that we fail to observe when we look at a person in meatspace and think they are whole, think they are okay. As always, art is truer than life, because art is not bound by physics or convention.

I got this book in physical form because I needed to touch it. It's hard to explain why. It's digital art, and there's a note that the colours are brighter in the pdf version. But I need to touch the pages, to run my fingertips over the smooth paper of textured pixels and images of cut outs. I needed the book to be as real in my hands as it is in my heart.

Melancholic Parables by Dale Stromberg

dark emotional funny reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

5.0

Reading Melancholic Parables is like listening to someone speaking what sounds like gibberish but you understand every word.

What is this book, this compilation of microstories? It's about all those tiny thoughts that run through your head, which you've never bothered to ask if anyone else wonders too. How would it feel to live your life twice, if you remembered everything? Is that weird feeling of being watched because of time-travelling tourists? What if there was a language in the dial-up modem buzz? Bellatrix Sakakino wonders along with you, and lives through the answers. That's part of this book. But that's not all of it, not exactly.

This is a book about being born in the wrong time, the wrong body, the wrong world. It is a book about failing to belong. It is a book about loneliness.

The microstories are absurd and deeply meaningful. I found myself wanting to quote them, but all-too-often unable to pull apart passages into neat quote-sized fragments, because sentences hung on paragraphs, on microstories, on the book. 

"Not every book is for every reader. A book must rhyme with you, or you with it."

This is a witty, clever book, but it's also a dark work: a work of uneasy ghosts and climate change, of loving your abuser and hating yourself. It might be better for me if this book didn't rhyme. But it does. This is a book for me. It might be for you, too.

(I recieved an advance copy of the book for review here and on the Night Beats blog.)

Noema by Dael Akkerman

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Now is not the first time the Earth's climate has changed. Now is not the first time that temperatures changed, that animals were driven to the brink of extinction, that food production dwindled. Noema is a story about human survival through environmental change twelve thousand years ago. But Noema is much more than historical fiction. 

This book is about the price of survival, and who pays it: the animals, the people, All Life. It is about the Law of Unintended Consequences and about complicity for what is done in what is done in your name, when you have been the one to teach people your name. Or when those people are the ones who gave you a name in the first place.

Names and identity are major themes in Noema. I still can't tell you who the narrator is, but then, I think that's the point. We are interconnected. We are the living and the dead. We are the humans and the horses and the wheat. We are All Life, and sometimes to preserve All Life, we have to make terrible sacrifices.

Noema is a book that lingers with you, that offers up its precious secrets deliciously slowly. It is a book you can read over and over.

A + E by Ryszard I. Merey

challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-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

I was 12% of the way through A+E when I realized it was going to break my heart.

Remember when you were young and queer and neurodiverse in a world that only had words for one of the three? Remember those friendships which lived in the liminal spaces between love and admiration and need and desire, and you didn't have words for any of those either, and you were a mess and so was your friendship-love but it was also the only thing that mattered in the world? You don't know if you want to be them, or be with them, but you know you can't survive without.

YA stories - well, stories about young adults - don't usually get me. They're didactic and clean and tidy, spoon-feeding the Reader a set of Important Messages. They're about what some adult wants a hypothetical teenager to learn. But sometimes, there's books about life as a teenager which are painfully, messily real. Books which I can't read in one sitting because I need to stop and let the memories subside safely back under the waters. Books which I can't stop reading, and can't stop thinking about when I finish.

A + E is that kind of story.

Ash and Eu are the rejects who find each other, who are open wounds in uncertain bodies, who are trapped in the vicious system to enforce compliance and conformity that is high school. I recognize the bands they listen to, the orange tic tacs they eat, the books on their shelves. I recognize the homophobia, though it was never that bad for me. I hope we left that behind in the 1990s, I hope things are easier for the Youth of now. I recognize the messy, hopeful, desperate friend-loves. Relationships that shaped my life, and that I have no words for, that don't exist in the lexicon of clean, tidy love, finally reflected back to me on the page. I won't ever leave those relationships behind; even if I never see the people again, they're still burned into me.

I was right. I was in tears by the end of A + E. 

In Flames by Nicole Northwood

adventurous emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes

5.0

I received an Advance Reader Copy of In Flames in return for an honest review.

The book opens with Sera telling us, "I am attuned to three things: blood, fire, and love", and this book delivers on all three. 

Sera is a sorceress with a rare gift for predicting love matches, and when she goes to college—a magical medical school—she meets her own celestial matches. But nothing is as she expected. Instead of one partner, she's matched with two men, and they matched with each other as well as her. And the college itself holds darker secrets, secrets of blood and murder. Sera and her partners need to fight for their match to survive.

This book is in the best tradition of magical dark academia. Imagine a grown-up, poly Harry Potter. A sexy Ninth House. I'd originally been quizzical about the idea of a matchmaking sorceress, but I loved the worldbuilding of a sex-positive culture where love is considered divinely inspired. The world exists at an intersection of magic and technology, where sorcerers text each other on their phones and hockey fans are kept magically warm in the arena stands. Then, of course, the mystery calls into question the entire society which built this so-called school of healing. It's a delightful play on a familiar genre, and I was left hoping for a sequel where I could see something of the world outside the school.

"But I’ll burn for you, Seraphina. I’ll burn for you if you ask me to."

Then there's the romance plotline, which is sizzlingly hot. There is a reason this book is called In Flames. Do not read this book in a drought or you might be accused of arson. I adored Seri, Alexi, and Dario, and it was pure delight to have a novel where no one had to choose between love interests in a love triangle. I will avoid spoilers, but I'll leave you with two words to end this review: hot chocolate.

Most Famous Short Film of All Time by Tucker Lieberman

challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

5.0

Like everything I truly love, I have no idea how to describe this novel. This is not going to be a very good book review, which is a shame because it is a very, very good book. I got an Advance Reader Copy in exchange for an honest review so I'm honour-bound to do my best, even if it's an impossible task.

I wish I had written this book.

In some ways, when I write, this is the book which I am trying to write. I can imagine telling Lev, the main character, that I no longer wished to write novels because he had already told my story better than I ever could. I imagine him answering that if I didn't write, I hadn't understood his story.

There's a Philip K Dick book, Valis, which I read twice. I have never met anyone who read it even once, so I never get to talk about it. The book seamlessly weaves together mental illness, science fiction, and religion in a pseudo-autobiographical narrative. The first time I read it, I, along with the narrator, lost track of what was real. Years later, on reread, I still believed the narrator over my own memory of the storyline.

I was 25% through Most Famous Short Film of All Time before I realized that the protagonist's name, Lev, was not the same as the author's name, Tucker, so even though the book is written in the first person, it is not, strictly speaking, an autobiography. I'm making a joke about Valis but no one will get it unless they've read that book. 

Philip K Dick had a religious epiphany that time was broken, and we're actually living through one moment in 50 AD, waiting for the boss to come back. In the film Waking Life, they say Philip K Dick got it partly right. Maybe 80%. Time is stopped, and there's only one moment, but it's not 50 AD. It's now. Like Alice (of Wonderland fame), Lev is stuck with jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today. Most Famous Short Film of All Time is about Lev choosing now. 

This is not how to write a book review. I don't know where I went wrong.

Please read Most Famous Short Film of All Time. I would like to talk about it with someone.

Into the Unknown A science Fiction Anthology by Rohan O'Duill, Emma Berglund, Lower Decks Press, Jason Clor

adventurous mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I was given an Advance Reader Copy of Into The Unknown in exchange for an honest review.

Eleven stories. Eleven takes on what the unknown holds for us. Eleven worlds, waiting to be explored.

These stories are reminiscent of golden-age science fiction, with non-stop adventures and strange worlds that don't follow the laws of earth. The characters, all too human, regularly face that sinking feeling when the pieces click into place and they realize exactly what the rules are. There are some excellent pieces of horror, from sentient maggots to forgetting the coffee grinder on a twenty-year space journey.

While the style reminds me of the best of classic science fiction, the themes are decidedly modern. Like The Expanse, Into The Unknown is science fiction with a political bite. Humanity's relationship with technology is explored through multiple angles. Pet, by Wendy Wee, asks what it means for humanity if we allow AI to make our decisions for us; Marriage Clause, by HL Hinkle, questions our humanity if we abuse AI which is bound to serve us. Climate change is also a recurring theme, with stories of dying colony ships, or of life on an uninhabitable earth.

These stories explore the push and pull that drive us into the unknown, and the adventures that await us there. A must read for all fans of classic science fiction.