Well that’s a fun story (and a great cover and title 😄).

Basically, take a struggling thief/con artist (with a tendency towards fire magic), give her a job bodyguarding a soon to be married young Lady and… see what happens. There are some crazy fight scenes, a few light plot twists, a skeletal mouse that goes BONG

Characterwise, man this is quite a cast. We have the Delly–our protagonist thief that can light things on fire–but the supporting cast are even better. Winn. A part troll illusionist/brawler–with quite the accent and past. Mrs. Totham, the Necromancer Body Scientist. The academic. The lady. The mother.

And of course Buttons.

I’ll leave that one for you to discover, but each time I the narrator read ‘Buttons said, “Bong.”’ I found myself grinning. It’s just weird and delightful.

Settingwise, it’s quasi-Victorian, which is a lot of fun. The language is a bit weird at times, with quite a few unexpected ‘fucks’ jumping out at you.. but apparently that’s about when the term really started to take off and branch out, so…

…her perception of egregious enfucktation in her current, present, and unfortunate familial circumstances…

It’s a fun setting though, going from the cities you most often see in a Victorian style out into the country and back. I want to see more of this world!

Plotwise, I didn’t expect the ‘protection’ mission itself to take up such relatively little of the book. It’s more an inciting incident than anything, but I’m glad for it. When we moved on from that–I was not at all ready to move on from this book. It’s all fairly straight forward (I expected a late book twist that never really materialized).

Overall, that was yet another delight of a book and if anything in this review struck your fancy–well worth the read!

Side note: This is apparently a sequel of sorts? Oops. From what I’ve seen, it’s more set in the same world with minor crossovers. But I’m going to have to go back and read it now!

Chocolate shouldn’t be a sin at all. Everyone deserves a bit of chocolate.

Gadriel, a former (now fallen) Guardian Angel owes her angelic bookie

So of course wacky hijinks ensue, things go wrong, people get hurt (not badly, it’s not that sort of book), and just perhaps–everyone comes out of it a bit better than they went in.

Believe me, plenty of people claim they love someone because they get the warm fuzzies around them - but love is something you do. Quite often, it’s something you choose.

It’s such a fun reading, reminding me fairly strongly of Good Omens

Structurally, the near constant footnotes detailing what is/isn’t a sin (points, The Good Place style) and the running score for Holly and her niece are a lot of fun. I didn’t expect that to work as well in an audiobook as it did, but each time I heard that little chime, I got a little smile.

Overall, another good read (on a bit of a run of those!). Well worth a try.

This book is … a weird mix of horror and romance, cozy and queer and weird all at once.

Basically, your main point of view is this shape shifting monster who eats people–who the author does quite a job of making you feel for, especially as–between the whole eating people thing–she ends up finding a family of her own and perhaps even falling in love.

Not at all where I would have expected the story to go from just the title and cover (and oh, that is a delightful cover).

It does get a weird bit ‘modern’ feeling at time, especially when Shesheshen (the monster protagonist) oscilates between having no idea how humans human (I get it, I really do)…

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” Homily said, hand going to her throat through the scarf. “I get self-conscious.”

“If you weren’t conscious of yourself, who would you be conscious of?”

…to feeling strongly about consent quite a number of times.

Then she realized the human woman was waiting for consent. Shesheshen sank more under her witch’s hat, and extended a foot. Once it was offered, Homily patted one of her meaty hands on Shesheshen’s calf. Why was she doing that? And why did it feel pleasant?

It’s a concept worth enforcing, but I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that it just didn’t quite fit the whole ‘monster who doesn’t get humans’ thing and it jumped out at me.

On the other hand, I love how ‘alien’ Shesheshen is (when she’s not thinking about consent). She doesn’t really have a body of her own, building it around whatever she eats (or finds lying around). The descriptions of how she builds around organs and puts them to her own use gets awfully gory at times, but is also a lot of fun to read.

Overall, it’s yet another fun read and if you don’t mind a bit of gore and a weird horror/romance mix, it’s well worth it. None too shabby for a debut! (First novel; Wiswell has a few published shorts)

Side note: I … did not expect to find this was written by a man.

Oh, T. Kingfisher is a lot of fun.

Smart goblins became mechanics. Dumb goblins became soldiers. Really dumb goblins became officers.

It’s this delightful little story about a world where Goblins are at war with the Humans and Elves. It’s told from the point of view of a ragtag group of Goblins who suddenly find themselves far behind enemy lines, having to ally themselves with … a veterinarian of all things.

It’s quite a funny book; the humor reminds me a lot of Discworld–take that as the compliment it is. I love reading about all the goblins. They are most certainly a wacky bunch of characters

Wherever a goblin happens to live, he complains about it constantly. This is actually a sign of affection. A desert goblin will complain endlessly about the beastly heat and the dreadful dryness and the spiky cactus. He will show you how his sunburn is peeling and the place where the rattlesnake bit him and the place where he bit the rattlesnake. He will be thoroughly, cheerfully, miserable.

Oh, and of course the teddy bear

The bear not only had a set of stripes sewn on his arm, it was possibly the first teddy-bear in history to have received a medal for service to the elven nation.

And the contrast of an Elven veterinarian, getting into all the dirty, messy, ugly things vets have to do (when Elves normally only concern themselves with that which is fair beautiful and true) is great fun.

It’s a quick read (147 pages) and well worth the fun. Give it a try!

Not all who wander are lost; some are on quests.

That was a very strange book. More than anything, it felt like ‘what if all of the more game parts of Dungeons and Dragons were real, what would that change about the world?’. Oh, and dig into the economics of it along the way.

We literally have an adventuring industry with heroes funded by corporate interests buying stakes in the eventual loot. Some sort of ’level’ system where you can turn in records of kills for advancement. Noncombat Paper Carries (NPCs).

It’s… a D&D satire.

I think the biggest weakness to me was more one of expectations. I actually expected it to go even more into the economics (that don’t really make any sense) of a adventuring based society. It’s there, but it could have been so much more!

That being said, I did enjoy the book, it was a fun read and the sense of humor was on point. I’ll have to check out the sequels at some point.

I can only give you words. Nothing fancy. But this will have to do.

It doesn’t matter if you’re reading it a year from now or a hundred years from now. By the end of the chronicle you will know that humanity carried the flame of knowledge into the terrible blackness of the unknown, to the very brink of annihilation. And we carried it back.

In the near future, thinking machines are even slightly more everywhere than they are now. Take it one step further along the road to true general AI… and suddenly you go outright Skynet on the world. Robot Apocalypse. Get it?

The true knowledge is not in the things, but in finding the connections between the things.

This … was perhaps not the best time to read this book, with the ever increasing advances in LLMs and chatbots leading to upheaval in all manner of fields of work, along with the current instability (to put it mildly) in the United States. I think I need more stability in books right now.

To survive, humans will work together. Accept each other. For a moment, we are all equal. Backs against the wall, human beings are at their finest.

That being said, it was a fascinatingly structured book. From the very first chapter, we know humanity (or what’s left of it) eventually wins the war. Each chapter, we have comments like ’this is the last record of X’ or ‘Y had a part to play yet’ And as we go, the various plots cross and come together, sketching out the end of the world and what comes after.

I will murder you by the billions to give you immortality. I will set fire to your civilization to light your way forward. But know this: My species is not defined by your dying, but by your living.

It’s a fascinating book and I think well worth the read… and I’m curious where exactly the sequel can possibly go next without more of the same.

Two years, two bingos, two Five SFF Shorts, both by Ted Chiang.

Man I love his shorts.

This one goes more scifi and deals more with time travel and parallel realities than the other (which had more scifi interacting with religion), but I love them both.

In particular, I The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate and Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom were my favorites. The eponymous Exhalation was an interesting look at entropy. And The Lifestyle of Software Objects, by far the longest, had the time to go even more through the development of the idea over years (in universe).

It’s interesting, I think that especially from this book, I find that I enjoy scifi more in shorts–you have time to explore many more ideas there–and longer form in fantasy–really digging into the worlds and characters more than the ideas.

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Space opera set on a backwater, mostly ignored planet with all sorts of secrets and corporate exploitation. Add in a cast of criminals and mercenaries and all sorts of characters that don’t get overmuch representation in the Sci-Fi of old (Lesbian, bi, and non-binary, oh my. And honestly, a cast of entirely women in the first place). And more than a touch of an exploration of Artificial General Intelligence–possible even more relevant with the current scope and expansion of LLMs–and you have quite a story.

I enjoyed it. It’s a mix of older tropes and newer characters. For the most part, the story went as I was expecting, but that’s not a bad thing. And it was a fun listen.

I think my biggest pain point is that if anything, Persephone Station tries to do too much. I particularly like books exploring truly alien aliens and machine minds–and comparing and contrasting how they think and how we think about them thinking. There are hints of that here, but it could have been so much more!

In any case, I enjoyed it and think it worth a listen. Onward!

If I had a nickel for every book I’d read recently where I went into it not really knowing much more than the cover and title and suddenly horror novel, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the ’90s about a women’s book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a blood-sucking fiend.

Which probably should have clued me in.

It’s a fascinating story that starts out fairly tame. A southern woman settled into a life of housewife–a life of long days, unthanked by her family.

“Why do you pretend what we do is nothing?” she asked. “Every day, all the chaos and messiness of life happens and every day we clean it all up. Without us, they would just wallow in filth and disorder and nothing of any consequence would ever get done. Who taught you to sneer at that? I’ll tell you who. Someone who took their mother for granted.”

And to brighten her days…

Sometimes she craved a little danger. And that was why she had book club.

That is, until a strange man moves in next door. With a mysterious aversion to sunlight.

Uh huh.

At some point, the book really gets into that ‘runaway freight train’ feeling. There are some serious body horror scenes in this book and it gets increasingly dark. I mean, it started with biting an ear off, but it goes quite a bit further than that…

Yeah, definitely a horror novel.

Overall, I enjoyed it. The American South housewife theme isn’t something I read overly much and it it’s interesting counterpoint to the vampiric horror. They’re both great examples of ‘pretty and polite on the surface–and absolutely not underneath’.

Worth a read, I’d say.

Grandma always said to me that you never do things for people to get something in return. That is the white man’s way of living. You do it because they need you. You do it because if you don’t, no one else will.

Well that’s quite a book!

In a word, it’s an urban fantasy about a Diné (Navajo) forensic photographer that can see ghosts. But it’s so much more than that.

First, I love the main character: Rita Todacheene. Someone that can see ghosts and a cop (or cop adjacent) is something I’ve seen before, but it being a forensic photographer gave a particular poignancy to the whole thing. And the Diné angle was fascinating–I’ve seen a bit of it in other urban fantasy books, but they have a particular way of looking at death which really plays interestingly against someone that can see ghosts!

As a bit of setting, the attention to detail on the cameras and the craft of photography was a really interesting touch. Rita, growing up poor but from a whole line of photographers. You really get the feeling she knows and loves everything about it which really gives a certain feel to the story.

Content warning though: We do get a number of descriptions of what exactly she’s photographing. And some of those are grisly. At least we don’t get the pictures? (I don’t actually know for sure, I listened to this on audiobook…)

Structurally, the book alternates between the present day–Rita trying to solve crimes and stay mostly sane with ghosts hounding here–and the past: Rita’s time growing up with her grandmother on a reservation, first coming to terms with life, death, and all it means to her specifically. It’s a really nice contrast, pulling the two stories together.

Plotwise, it’s not the most complicated of mysteries. You mostly have enough clues to figure out where this is going, but oh the ride to get there. It’s still well worth it.

I learned early that no amount of prayer or smoke or love was ever going to change the fact that these lights wanted to talk to me. Even at three years old, I knew it was something that deeply terrified my grandma and our medicine man. It was something that I was going to have to hide from them. As I got older, I taught myself how to look beyond the ghosts and mute their voices.