Note: I know the author socially.
A reread for my book club! Honestly I loved it even more on reread. I thought the agony of the neverending nature of the conflict came through even more this time around, and boy I just really want the resolution to work for everyone!! Just a beautifully constructed story.
Grade: A
Another vacation book! This one is a perfect post-retirement hockey romance by the author of the Game Changers series, but it's a standalone in a separate universe. Adam and Riley were a d-man pairing and best friends and roommates who were also more than all that, until Adam freaked out and married a woman and broke Riley's heart. So Riley requested a trade and then retired early from hockey, and they didn't see each other for over a decade until Riley's dad died and Adam showed up at the funeral in Riley's tiny Nova Scotian seaside village, where Riley spent five summers when they were young players together.
I really enjoyed both the second chance romance and the fantasy of owning a small house right on the water with a garden and having a wonderful queer friends group. The conflict of when they were players together made perfect sense, and if some of the resolution felt a bit too easy, especially coming so fast after Riley losing his beloved father, the characterization and chemistry is strong enough for me to buy it. A lovely read on a rainy weekend away.
Grade: A
What a charming bite sized Christmas novella! This is actually much more in line with what I expected Honeypot to be like - it's two secret agents who have been secretly fucking whenever they encountered each other on opposite sides of the Cold War who find themselves without a clear purpose in the early 1990s. They've both been sent to an English country house to steal incriminating letters at a Christmas party, and wouldn't you know there's just the right kind of bed for them to fall into together. This had almost no real conflict and I had a great time reading it.
Grade: A
First book of the year! This is a memoir by an author whose lifting newsletter I've been a reader of for many years at this point. It's a really interesting accounting of how she came to integrate her sense of self with her sense of having a physical body as an adult. It's not a self-help book, but it's also a book that made me think a lot about my own relationship to my body, and how I do and don't consider it to be the same thing as Me. It's hard not to read a book like this without searching for the answer, for the key to fixing my own relationship to my body, and it's too honest to peddle that kind of absolution. I both respect it more for not and wish it had, for obvious reasons. But it did make me think that it's at least possible to change, which is worth a lot.
Grade: A
A delightful little novella about what happens with Queen Elizabeth II stops off at the lending library van near the palace and starts reading novels for the first time in her life. Involves a friendship with a gay servant from the kitchens who gives her reading recommendations and a discovery of what you can learn from books even if you've been everywhere and met everyone as a nation's sovereign. Just extremely enjoyable in the specific gay British way of Bennett.
Grade: A
An absolutely delightful gothic manor house murder mystery with bonus gay love story book! I really, really enjoyed what this story did with the conventions of both genres, and how it both delivered on the promise of those kinds of stories while also deconstructing elements of it. Definitely among my favorites of this author's, who's long been a favorite of mine!
Grade: A
An incredible book. I read this because I wanted to have experienced the book before I saw the movie, and the way the story is told in this medium is just a triumph. Agnes is such a fascinating, compelling character, but everyone we meet is; this is historical fiction that somehow fully conveys how foreign a land the past is while also reminding us of the fact that people have always been people. The slight of hand with the capital S Shakespeare of it all is expertly done, and the fact that I knew going in what would happen didn't affect how it landed for me at all. Just a book that made me remember why books are good, actually.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
A delightful little novella, about a girl with magic who accidentally uses it in the most cruel way imaginable against her beloved older brother because of her hurt, and has to go on an adventure to the fairyworld to save him, and does so in a remarkable if roundabout way. Bite-sized but has stuck with me and I want to revisit it already.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
A delightful book of short stories, drabbles and visual art in the Temeraire universe! Something like methadone for me as I attempt to recover post-series. I don't have many deep thoughts about any of this other than what a nice time!
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
I have finished the series ;____; this is both great and terrible. As is almost always true of this author, I got to a point in the final part of something she's written and thought how on earth is she going to pull it all together in a satisfying way? And as always, boy did she pull it off. The resolution to the war is incredible, the future that we see glimpses of feels both right and earned, and there's no sense of the rules of the world having to be broken in order to give us this. Laurence and Temeraire remain among my favorite characters I've gotten to spend a whole series with, and finally reading this whole thing this fall was one of the nicest things I did all year.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
So Victory of Eagles gave me the joy of Temeraire thinking that Laurence is dead; this book gave me Temeraire in denial and a Laurence with deep, deep amnesia. I stayed up way too late reading because I simply could not pause until Laurence remembered his dragon again!! Honestly, I need to reread the whole thing because I simply could not appreciate everything as well as I might have because I needed to burn through it so fast.
Beyond that beloved, expertly deployed trope, the story of this book is so good, with betrayal and set ups and plotting and doublecrossing and just so much fun military stuff. I haven't really gotten into how good the melding of actual historically based warfare and aerial dragon strength is combined, but it's so impressive. One of my absolute favorites of the series.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
A quietly devastating entry in the series! I simply was not prepared to be fully losing a whole ship and a character who had been so important since the beginning, and it made me extremely stressed out about what might happen in the final two novels of the series. I loved the culture and the world that we see in South America, and the completely different social structure between humans and dragons they find there, and the way Temeraire continues to incorporate it all into his goals and aims for dragon rights. We also get the Granby reveal, which is truly one of my favorite things in the entire series, because the men are so overwhelmed by it and the dragons are just completely nonplussed. A delight!
Grade: A
This past year I read and watched a lot of media about World War I, which is an era that I keep thinking about in part because of what we're currently going through globally. This is a book I got from the library when I decided to just request everything they had that had been written by Ben Macintyre after I read The Spy and the Traitor, and it really knocked me out.
It's structured as a mystery -- who betrayed these four British* soldiers hiding in a French village during WWI -- and while the question of who might have done that and why, and what proof we have one way or another a hundred years later, is certainly key to the narrative of the book, I found so much about the story to be fascinating. In particular, the inability to know and even less to believe what was happening in war just ten miles down the road, the horror when that reality came crashing into a small provincial town, the way the war was the worst elements of modernity obliterating the literal landscape of people's worlds -- all of it is explored and excavated in truly painful and awful ways. A great book that fucked me up and made me want to read so much more about this time.
*One of them was Irish, but technically for the time that meant he was considered to be British, but it still made me twitch every time the author collectively referred to them as such.
Grade: A
What a lovely, kind book about existing in 2025.
This is in many ways a classic chicklit book of the 2000s, but with a contemporary worldview of work and relationships and how being an adult feels in the venture capitalism reality of media. Our protagonist is Cecily, a great podcast producer who got fucked over by her ex-boyfriend and former creative partner and is now letting other people control her career path. Her boss makes her do a podcast that purports to make over her life and find her a boyfriend, essentially, but at the same time she has an incredible meetcute with a man with a giant dog. The process of how she finds her way to herself and to having a relationship with the guy who actually deserves her is just so, so nice, and the conflict is both real and never so stressful that I couldn't enjoy the process. Just does exactly what you want it to, written by someone who clearly knows from the world she's depicting.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
Another travelogue part of this series! This one takes place in Australia, and there's a lot of good stuff in it but it's also a bit harder for me just because Laurence is still taking all of this so hard and also I want the other asshole British dudes to suffer more!!!! But the stuff that works fucking works, and I had a great time reading it!
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
Everything that made the prior book in this series hard makes this book absolutely delicious for me. Laurence and Temeraire accepting the punishment for their absolutely morally righteous decision and then suffering even more because Temeraire thinks Laurence is dead and loses his fucking mind is incredible. The reunion!!! The emotions!! The continued consequences and depression that is only alleviated by the fact that they have each other, the triumph at the end at a moment when all looks lost, just an absolute delight from start to finish. Among my favorites of the whole series.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
This is the last of this series that I'm certain I've read before, primarily because it involves a character and a location that made me very very happy. This is also the book that I think solidifies the reality that it's a series that will give a resolution to the end of each book, but not necessarily a happy one--it's very stressful and while our main guys are all okay by the end and theoretically on the way home to something familiar and nice, the process of getting there is hard and also it's less and less clear that those who should be on Laurence and Temeraire's side actually are! Very complicated, but still a very fun reread.
Grade: A
This book was mentioned on one of my pop culture podcasts, and historical fiction about a young da Vinci, a Medici and a Cardinal in Rome immediately felt like something for me! This is an era and location of history that I don't know much about, which meant that I had no real sense of where the larger political elements were going, which was pretty exciting. Of the three main stories, the one I was most invested in was da Vinci's, but the broader focus on the world he became the artist he would be in Florence really made that smaller element of the story land for me. One of those books that made me immediately want to read and watch one million more stories about this historical era.
Grade: A
I initially read the titular short story last spring because I wanted to have read it before seeing the movie based on it, and I enjoyed it quite a bit but it lacked something of the knockout punch for me. This fall, after seeing the movie, I reread the short story and then the full collection of twelve stories, and they absolutely floored me. They are all in their own way the most beautifully New England stories, whether they're set in the 21st century or hundreds of years earlier, and the structure of the book and the way pairs of the stories are linked across time, either in terms of location or thematically or because of artifacts that exist in multiple times, deepens the impact of each individual story. The specificity of the worlds and the people within them will stay with me for a long, long time.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
This is when the series turns into a proper travel adventure! The second book in the Temeraire series is when things become more complicated in lots of different ways, and also when it becomes clear that this isn't an alternate history series that's just going to brush past the way that colonialism and chattel slavery shaped the economics and political structures of the world. That makes it less simple fun than the first book, but the expansion of the world and the introduction of the Chinese court in particular is so incredibly compelling. Also, Temeraire makes a lot of good points!
Grade: A
