Book 20: Copper Script by KJ Charles

A book that beautifully straddles the line between a murder mystery and a romance! This author writes about damaged men finding each other in post-Great War Britain so well, and this one has just a touch of the paranormal to keep it interesting. Joel can essentially see who a person is at their core from their handwriting, and this skill makes him useful for both a socialite checking up on their fiancée and a cop trying to solve a murder. The cop in question is Aaron, a detective who's living a small, closeted life and has to open himself to work with Joel to save themselves and apprehend the crook. And you know what, it just works! It's a nice book with a lovely romance at the center of it, and if the mystery isn't the most complicated one I've ever read, I still really enjoyed my time reading this. It hit the spot.

Grade: A

Book 24: Lone Women by Victor LaValle

A book club book! I hadn't read anything by this author before, and I really enjoyed this book a lot. It's set in early 20th century Western U.S., and focuses on a Black woman who has left California after the suspicious circumstances of her parents' deaths and makes her way to Montana, because unmarried women (including Black women) are allowed to claim homesteads in their own name. She's traveled light aside from a locked steamer trunk, which attracts a lot of attention. 

I don't want to say much more because I went into this book pretty cold, and from the very first page it just drops you right in and lets you figure out which way is up. It's described as being horror fiction, which I understand, but for me it's more horror cut with magical realism. Adelaide is a wonderful POV character, and the history of Montana made me want to read a number of the books that initially inspired this story. It's an eerie book that doesn't shy away from how harsh living on your own as a Black woman would be on a homestead, but it's not a story that wants to spotlight those challenges for their own sake. I'll definitely be reading more works by this author in the future.  

Grade: B

Book 22: Tread of Angels by Rebecca Roanhorse

A book club book! At the last minute my work schedule cleared just enough for me to read this in time for my May book club, and I'm glad it did! It was the perfect length for that kind of turnaround - this novella is a very quick, enjoyable read. 

This story is a real blend of genres and tropes - it's got flavors of the Old West frontier standing in as a sort of liminal space for both the Elite and the Fallen, two kinds of people who either have divinity or do not. Angels and demons are real and walk among the humans, and the story centers on Celeste and Mariel. Both are Fallen but Celeste can pass as Elite, and that becomes very useful when Mariel is arrested for the murder of a Virtue and has to figure out how to prove her sister's innocence. There are saloon brawls and ex-lovers and secret lovers and so on and so forth, and it's very fun! I think I was hoping for a bit more from it overall than it gave; the world is interesting enough that I would have enjoyed a novel that fully fleshed out the elements of the society and the various characters living in the town. The end in particular didn't quite land the way I was hoping it might, and some of the tropes felt gestured at, rather than really developed. Someone at my book club said that it felt a bit like a pandemic book to her, and that felt right to me. Perfectly enjoyable, but not exceptional. 

Grade: B

Book 20: The World We Make by NK Jemisin

A book club book! But also a book that I was always going to read on my own, since it's the sequel to The City We Became, which I absolutely loved.

It's always interesting reading something that you know is in a slightly different form than had been originally intended; this series was initially planned as a trilogy, rather than a duology, and there are aspects of the plotting that felt a bit like attempting to fit two suitcases' worth of clothes into one: there's not a lot of space for things to breathe, and there are definitely elements of it that I would have loved to have seen expanded, and entire sequels or tangents I would have read whole books about. But the fundamental themes and relationships that mattered so much to me in the first book still ring true in this one. She kept me on absolute pins and needles regarding one resolution that I was absolutely ready to burn down the world for, and when we got there it was worth it in the end. The first book captured me completely by the story itself, and the second was both about the text and about how she was able to arrive at the text, a lesson in the world shaping what stories we can tell and how. There was a defiance to the first book that was still present in the second one, but also an awareness of how long the fight is, and how many angles the enemy will pursue to further its goals. I'm so glad I got to read this ending. 

Grade: A 

Book 19: Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw

This is a Tor free novella that I got a couple of years ago and finally got around to reading. It's a noir crime story with a supernatural twist; it reminded me a bit of the Rivers of London books and how they combine two distinct genres and play around with both. 

Overall I enjoyed it! The noir styling is aggressive but not over the top for me, and there's enough twists and turns in the case the P.I. takes to keep me engaged. I don't know that I would want to spend a whole novel in this world, but the length fits for the story and themes. A nice way to spend a cold winter evening. 

Grade: B

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 11: Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline

 A book club book! Another one of those where I managed to read the book but missed the actual book club, which is a shame because I think discussing it with others would have helped fix the story in my mind. I am writing this post about four months after I read it, and I had to read a review of it to remind myself of what the story was. But as soon as I did, I could feel the atmosphere of this story, one of loss and grief and of having something taken from a person and a people, under the guise of religion and moving on. 

Joan is First Nations in Ontario, someone who left her home and then came back with her husband Victor, the love of her life. When he disappears after an argument, he is presumed to either be dead or to have left her, but she never believes either. This is borne out when she sees her husband as part of a traveling revival, but her husband is no longer himself. The book is folklore and monsters combined with religion and colonizers, and at the heart of it is Joan's grief and her single-minded obsession with getting her husband back. It's a read that really centers you in her world and her grief, even when the POV shifts in incredibly disorienting and effective ways. Highly recommended. 

Grade: A 

Book 9: The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy

 This is a Tor novella that is part of a LGBTQ story anthology. I...liked it? Sort of? It's got a Hannibal-esque horror feeling to me, with certain other elements of like myth and gutterpunks and a vaguely post-apocalyptic vibe, but none of the story really stuck with me, and I never felt like I had a good grasp on the protagonist. One of those "I am sure that this story is really for someone, but that someone is not me" books. 

Grade: B

Book 53: Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All by Laura Ruby

This is a book club book that I had read half of but failed to finish reading in time about a year and a half ago, and I had forgotten so much of it that I just started over from the beginning. And I'm really glad I did!

The structure of the book is that it is told from the perspective of a ghost, who is following a pair of sisters at a Catholic orphanage during World War II. The narrative goes back and forth between telling the story of Frankie and her younger sister Toni, and piecing together the history of how the ghost died, and why she's there, and what she remembers. It tells the very real story of the aftermath of the Depression flowing into the war, while weaving through the stories of a number of women whose lives were, as always seems to be the case, controlled by and halted by men.

When I originally read the first half of it, I found some of the conceit of the book to be a bit hard to take, and I don't know if I just got used to it or if the payoffs in the second half of the book just made them easier to accept, but it bothered me less this time. I also was completely blindsided by a death I knew had to be coming; the way it was told just gutted me, and it's yet another book I've read during the pandemic that also captures the strange remove of living through major events that somehow seem distant from your own life, until they're not. All in all, a really nice read.

Grade: B

Book 13: The Beautiful by Renée Ahdieh

I borrowed this book from the library after seeing a description of it somewhere, because I am an easy sell for a book about vampires in late nineteenth century New Orleans. But man, I gotta say that I was pretty bored by this book. It's hard to know for sure what I would have thought of it had I read it when I was a teenager, something I always try to keep in mind when I read paranormal YA romance - it is entirely plausible that I would have been swept up by the tropes and setting and all that. But at least as an adult, nothing in the book stuck with me long enough to leave a lasting impression.

Grade: C