Book 36: Santa Daddy by Keira Andrews

My third Christmas romance of 2022! This one was right in the middle of the pack - it was a novella, so it didn't suffer in the same way that the second book did, and I did enjoy it, but it didn't quite hit my tropes the same way the first one did. This is about an older man finding love again 8 years after the death of his husband, and the guy who helps break him out of his shell again, and a lot of that is very good for me but I didn't quite buy the chemistry between these two characters in particular? Also I don't particularly have any feelings about sexy santa, which may help with this book, lol. 

Grade: C

Book 35: Merry Cherry Christmas by Keira Andrews

Okay, so the first Christmas romance I read this year was a novella, and then I picked up this one by the same author, and it's a novel, and man. I think it's just trying to be too much? The pace of the book is off, and the two big things that both characters are struggling with are both too slight and too significant to be dealt with in a book this size, and idk. Jeremy is a freshman in college who's been somewhat disowned by his family for coming out as gay, he's socially awkward, and he's never even kissed a guy. Max is a popular senior who plays football and is openly queer and confident, and they have a meet cute and then Max offers to be his no strings friends with benefits. Would you believe that feelings happen? Then Max invites him home for Christmas, and there are plot obstacles and a poor dude who gets in the middle and idk, it just doesn't quite work the way I wanted it to. Not a bad read, just not as good as other books by this same author. 

Grade: C

Book 34: Where the Lovelight Gleams by Keira Andrews

The first of my yearly gay Christmas romances! I enjoyed this one a lot, which is a tight little novella - frankly my preferred length for most Christmas romances - about two actors who are costars playing characters in love who end up spending Christmas together at a family cabin in Canada. One of the guys is out and knows he's in love with the other one, and the other guy is dating a woman but coming to terms with the fact that maybe he's not actually straight. He and his girlfriend break up, he comes to spend Christmas with his costar in Canada, and shenanigans ensue! The required third act conflict is a BIT over the top for me, but the classic hurt/comfort reconciliation is great, so overall I had a great time with this one. 

Grade: B

Book 33: Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather

I really enjoyed this novella!! It was such an interesting sci-fi space opera setup about a convent of nuns in a living spaceship traveling through the galaxy who discover that their larger leadership is corrupt. They respond in fascinating ways, and all of them have really compelling relationships with each other and dynamics and secrets, and idk! It's just WEIRD in exactly the way I want these kinds of speculative fiction novellas to be. 

Grade: A

Book 32: Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

The second book in the Rivers of London series! I liked this one, though not quite as much as the first one, which had the benefit of being the introduction to the world, while this one just expands on it and gets more into Peter's family history. Luckily, that story is still pretty good! Just slightly less memorable. 

Grade: B

Book 31: Miranda in Milan by Katharine Duckett

 Boy, this novella did not work for me. As is probably evident from the title, it's a story about Miranda from The Tempest living in Milan after the end of the play. This should really be my jam, or at least interesting to me. But both the story and the writing didn't capture me, and I felt really disappointed by it. This is just something that happens with books sometimes, and it's a bummer!

Grade: C

Book 30: A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow

 A book club book! This is a fairly standard modern retelling/adaptation of a fairy tale, in this case Sleeping Beauty, in which the princess is a young woman named Zinnia who has a chronic, fatal illness. Her best friend sets up a birthday celebration for her that turns this into a portal fantasy, and she goes through a journey to potentially save both her life and the life of the princess she meets in that other universe. 

I enjoyed this novella, but I think I wanted/hoped for a bit more - there's an interaction in the portal section of the story that almost but not quite knocked my socks off, and it made me think that the story had gotten a bit held back in order to make it fit a more standard narrative. Basically I thought that this story could have been much weirder and broken more of the narrative expectations, and it would have felt both more cohesive to me and more interesting. But it was still a fun read. 

Grade: B

Book 29: Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Another mystery! This is the second one in the series that started with Magpie Murders, which I enjoyed a lot. This one has a similar framing device, except that the order of operations is slightly different: in the first book, the book editor had to solve the real life murder in order to solve the incomplete mystery manuscript, and in this one, the answer to one and possibly two real life murders can be found in a complete published mystery. 

This book was something of a pickle for me - the overall structure of the mystery worked just as well for me as the first book did, where in all three mysteries the reveals and explanations were clever and fit together perfectly, even though I couldn't have predicted the outcome. Unfortunately, there is also a very clear thread of homophobia running throughout this book, one that started in the first book but didn't fully bloom until the sequel. I'm sure that the defense of it would simply be that "well there really are some gay men who are like that" and so forth, but I started to have a bad feeling about it halfway through the story, and then by the end it was about as bad and frankly cliched as it could be. I really enjoy the mystery within the mystery of the structure, but I really can't in good conscience recommend this book. 

Grade: C 

Book 28: Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire

The next novella in the Wayward Children series! I am experiencing a bit of diminishing returns at this point with this series, unfortunately - I'm still enjoying the stories individually, but I want them to have more an arc, I think? This one definitely completes a story involving two of the major characters, and I do enjoy that element, but something about how they're all fitting together isn't delivering the satisfaction I want from a series of novellas that don't really exist as standalone stories anymore. I was happy to see Jack triumph, but the journey left me a bit cold. 

Grade: B

Book 27: In An Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

There are times when I know that it's less that the books I'm reading aren't good, and it's more that I'm reading them badly. This is the fourth book in the Wayward Children series, and the second one that focuses on one character's experience before they make it to the school. The main character in the story is Lundy, and the world she found the door to is the Goblin Market. 

The entire system of the Goblin Market is built around the concept of fair value - if you ask something of someone, you need to provide them fair value in exchange, and if you're unable to, you are in their debt. The debt in this world (and in our world, if you leave) is a physical change; once you are too far in debt, you lose your humanity and become a bird. Lundy tries desperately to have her life in the Goblin Market without giving up her life at home, especially for her younger sister. But she is unable to properly calibrate the fair value required for such a thing. It is a sad story that feels extremely unfair, perhaps especially because it is a world that presents itself as being completely in balance, and I had a hard time with it emotionally. 

Grade: B

Book 26: An Unnatural Life by Erin K. Wagner

Another free Tor novella about humans and robots! This one fucked me up less regarding the pandemic, but did slightly fuck me up in terms of issues around legal rights and so forth, so it is possible that it is the world that's fucking me up rather than the fiction I'm consuming. Who could have guessed. 

This one centers on a woman named Aiya, who is a lawyer living on a space colony. She works for a program that is designed to rehabilitate robots who have committed crimes, but then she ends up representing one who has been wrongfully accused of murder. It deals with lots of questions about agency and control and who we hold responsible for various elements in society, and once again it was a story that was hard for me to engage with at the moment. But I found it very interesting overall. 

Grade: B

Book 25: Unlocked by John Scalzi

This was a free Tor download, and I've been meaning to read something by Scalzi for a while, so I thought sure! I'll give it a shot! And then discovered that it was a novella written in 2014 about a respiratory pandemic that overran the world and eventually resulted in some people's bodies no longer working, but their minds still did, so people invented a robot to interface with the people's minds to become that person out in the world, and it turns out I just cannot handle this particular story and the way politics are depicted right now! I found the things that were accurate to be just as upsetting as the things that weren't, and yeah. I have no idea how to objectively rate this, so take this grade as being more of a reflection of what I can handle reading rather than a judgment on the quality of the writing or storytelling. 

Grade: C

Book 24: In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan

Another portal fantasy! And another book I have owned for a very long time and kept waiting for the "right time" to read, for some reason, even though I have read many other things by this author that I've enjoyed. And shockingly, I enjoyed this one, too!

Elliot is thirteen when he first crosses over into the Borderlands, and discovers that in this magical portal land, there's a training camp where everyone either learns how to fight or how to engage in diplomacy. But no one is actually very interested in using diplomacy as a means of resolving disputes among humans and elves and trolls and banshees and mermaids and so forth, at least not before he arrived. He also immediately falls in love with a beautiful elf named Serene, and in hate with a beautiful boy named Luke Sunborn, who comes from a famous family of warriors. And then it's adventures and battles and multiple romances and misunderstandings and family of origin woes and found family woes and comings out and pining and, of course, a unicorn sighting. It is a delight, in other words, though I think the pacing could have been tightened up a bit in the second half of the novel, but even when things seemed to go on a bit longer than they actually needed to, I had a great time reading it. 

Grade: A 

Book 23: Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch

After meaning to read the Rivers of London series for years, I have finally begun! Turns out it's good. 

It's very interesting what my brain retained about the series from what I had heard from others. I knew it was a detective series, essentially, about a guy named Peter (correct) who was training under an experienced detective (also correct, his superior is Thomas Nightingale). But I had forgotten that it was also a supernatural series, which made the first mention of a ghost pretty exciting, and I also went into expecting a standard white English copper character, and instead Peter Grant is biracial and from North London and quite young, all of which makes him (and the first book of the series) much more interesting than I expected. 

The book reads very much like the first in a series, setting up the world and the central figures in it, and I had been more in a traditional mystery structure mood than I realized when I started reading it and so it took me a bit to get into the rhythm of the book. But in the end I enjoyed it quite a bit, and Peter is a great character, with his at times almost Jim Butcher-level over the top lusting for every female character introduced in the book my only true complaint. It's the only element of the storytelling that felt at all dated to me, but it's worth putting up with for the rest of the narrative. 

Grade: B 

Book 22: Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

The third book in the Wayward Children series! This was the one that made me realize that the second book wasn't a standalone, but was in fact a prequel/backstory sort of thing, because we returned to the school directly after the events of the first book. This story reintroduced my favorite character Kade, and added a new character named Cora who I absolutely loved. She's a fat girl who found her world as a mermaid, where her body did exactly what it was supposed to do, and it was just a really lovely depiction of what it is to be "special" and yet not fit the supposed mold of even that. These books have all been extremely thoughtful in how it approaches gender, and how children are unnecessarily shaped within a binary, and I liked how the author approached weight and appearance in a similar way.   

The plot of this one is essentially a journey through various other worlds, and it ends in a candy world with a baker at the center of it, and the whole thing felt like reading a video game in the best way, with all of them learning the logic (or nonsense) that governs the various places they traveled to. I'm excited to find out whether the fourth book in the series will return to the school, or if it will also take place primarily beyond the doors. 

Grade: A 

Book 21: Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Another mystery, but this time a modern one! However, it's a modern one masquerading as a post-WWII one, all wrapped up in an enigma, you know how it goes. 

The framing device for this book is that Susan, a book editor in modern London, has received the manuscript for the ninth and final book in the Atticus Pund mystery series, which is set in a small English village in the 1950s and has all of the trappings you would expect from this. The first two hundred pages of the book are that novel, until suddenly it stops at the end of the penultimate chapter on the cliffhanger of who's responsible for the murders. Susan doesn't have the final chapter, and neither does the CEO of the publishing house. The author, Alan Conway, must have it, except he died by suicide over the weekend...or did he?

This is a book in which we get two mysteries for the price of one, a classic whodunit in the style of Christie, and a contemporary meta mystery in which a book editor must assume the role of the detective, to varying degrees of success. It leaves you with one heck of a cliffhanger midway through the book and forces you to both abandon the pretense of the mystery you first started to read as being 'real' and then introduces a new one, which parallels and echoes the first one in interesting ways. It's not easy to keep a reader invested in both of the mysteries at once, but the author definitely pulls it off. I'm very glad I read this particular book after spending a month or two reading a number of the classic mysteries so I had a better grounding in the tropes this books swims around in. Horowitz has written a number of other books (as well as Midsomer Murders and Foyle's War and Poirot, this is a man who knows what genre he wants to write) and I'm afraid my TBR pile is about to get unexpectedly bigger once again. 

Grade: A 

Book 20: The Geek Who Saved Christmas by Annabeth Albert

Look, sometimes you just need to read a Christmas m/m romance novel right after Easter. 

This one was...fine? The set up was great: a cute guy named Gideon who's obsessed with decorating for Christmas (but is secretly sad!) and a gruff guy named Paul who doesn't have time or space in his heart for such things but then needs to convince his younger brother that he's okay when he comes to visit for Christmas, and what better way to do that than with tons of Christmas lights! It's full of Christmas planning and discussions of traditions and all of that, and the two leads have decent chemistry, but there's not nearly enough actual conflict in their romance or in the overall story to sustain a full-length novel, so by the end I was bored. Would be a great 20K fic, but it doesn't hold up to a 250+ page book. 

Grade: C 

Book 19: Death in a White Tie by Ngaio Marsh

My foray into classic English society mysteries continue! I was recommended this book at some point, by...someone (possibly my sister-in-law? Who can say), and unlike Christie, I was entirely unfamiliar with this author culturally. She was also a woman writing mysteries in the first half of the twentieth century, although she was from New Zealand rather than England. The focus of her books (at least based on this one) feels quite similar to Christie's - there was a blackmailer in the upper crust of 1930's English society, one man learns too much, and he ends up dead. 

There's also an inspector named Roderick Alleyn who knew the dead man quite well and feels responsible, but he holds it together long enough to piece together both the blackmail scheme and the murder. It was a quite pleasant mystery with interesting characters and a number of unexpected secrets and so forth. I was also very pleased that while there is a touch of the standard English mystery racism present, it wasn't too bad...at least not until the very short epilogue which takes place in China, and well. The less said about that the better. That caveat aside, a lovely book to read on the couch under the blankets while waiting for spring to actually start. 

Grade: B

Book 18: Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

I have finally returned to Wayward Children series! And frankly, I probably should have reread Every Heart a Doorway before I picked up this one, because I read that novella in November 2019 and it turns out I retained practically nothing from that time, can't imagine why, etc. As a result, I didn't remember the roles that Jack and Jill played in that book when I read this one, which tells the story of what they experienced in the world they found through their door. This book still works without that knowledge, which is to its credit, but I am sure there are parts of the story that I would have appreciated more had I recognized the connection before reading the third book in the series shortly after. I do like the structure, though, of switching between stories taking place after the children have returned to earth and the direct stories of how they found their doors - the backstories, if you will. I expect that once I read through the next three books I'm going to feel the need to finally reread the first one, and I'm excited to find out what exactly that looks like. 

Grade: B

Book 17: Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

Another Christie mystery! This is the first one I've read after already seeing an adaptation of it. I watched the 2022 movie version of it, enjoyed it, and also immediately wondered how much of it differed from the book. The answer: a fair amount, but very little of the central mystery. 

This particular mystery is essentially a travelogue, which make it both extremely fun and also sometimes painful to read because it was written by a British woman in the 1930s who doesn't merely think that imperialism is good, she also wouldn't (or at least doesn't appear to in this book) even consider imperialism to be something that needed to be defended. The British Empire is simply a fact of the world, and one that's uncontroversial and unchallenged. So that makes her descriptions of Egypt and the people who live and work there to be the definition of casually racist, and her presentation of the various suspects and their lives can be uncomfortable at times for similar reasons. However, with that rather strong caveat noted, I still did have a nice time reading it, not least because thinking about adaptation is something I enjoy and there were a number elements to consider from that standpoint. I might recommend the movie instead, though, either the 2022 version or the 1978 one, which is apparently much more faithful to the original story. 

Grade: B