Overall March was a solid month of reading (20 books!), including some real highlights of the year. We’ll see how I feel about them in a few months, but Drome, Beyond Redemption, and The Memory of the Ogisi are all on my shortlist for favorite books of the year. Mostly, I’m staring down April 1st with a small army of achillean novels I’ve been holding off on reading until the r/fantasy Bingo challenge resets. More on that tomorrow!
Mini Reviews
Traitor’s Moon by by Lynn Flewelling
Book 3 in the Nightrunner series, and iconic early epic fantasy featuring gay characters. I don’t know that I have a ton of new things to say here, so I’ll mostly refer readers to my reviews of Luck in the Shadows and Stalking Darkness (books 1 and 2 respectively). This entry leans more into political intrigue as our characters visit a land of elves with the serial numbers filed off. A glossary would have been helpful, but I thought this was a much better political intrigue novel than most. It’s got a very 1990s style of writing, and if Flewelling wrote this today it would likely have been 200 pages shorter. Good fantasy, and a series I’ll continue. However, I’m not in a rush to pick up #4 immediately.
Blacksad by Juan Díaz Canales
Woof, this is one hell of a noir stereotype. How much more of a tortured-soul name can you get? Blacksad is ready to go to a My Chemical Romance concert while bitching about how his trench coat got slashed. It’s got sleazy rich mobsters and fistfights in dark alleys. It’s got dramatic monologues about how Blacksad is kind of a good person but is ultimately dark and broody. And of course, it has gorgeous fucking art. This book commits wholeheartedly to classic Noir vibes, which will be a good litmus for whether you’ll enjoy this series or not.
Unfortunately, the book saw no desire to subvert or confront the sexist history of noir. The female characters are mostly sexualized, plot irrelevant, and stereotypes. Even the visual art of male vs female characters is notable. Male characters have animalist characteristics played up, embracing their species. Meanwhile, it’s oftentimes difficult to tell what species of animals the female characters are, because they mostly just look like humans with weirdly shaped ears. While I wish I could say Canales was doing this intentionally as a way to deconstruct classic noir tropes, the story never headed in that direction. Thus I have to admit it’s just a lazy continuation of the sexist tropes of classic Noir without a desire to follow the direction modern Noir has taken.
One Giant Leap by Kay Simone
This was a sweet romance between an Astronaut and a Communications Officer who fall in love via communication during spaceflight. The ultimate long distance relationship! Some of the elements stretch belief (do you really expect me to believe that NASA doesn’t have any backups for when an essential ground crew member is sick? This organization is famous for its contingencies), but overall it was sweet if slightly forgettable.
The Shots You Take by Rachel Reid
Am I burned out on sports romances, or is this just not one that resonated with me? Considering no actual hockey is played, probably the latter. It’s a second chance romance between two childhood friends, one of whom was in denial about being gay at the time. Now in their 40s, they navigate a reconnection and an attempt to make amends. This felt very realistic, but something about the characters’ chemistry didn’t quite click. I guess I just didn’t buy that they were in love?
Black Solstice by Martin Desmond Roe
A year ago, all Black people in the world got superpowers on the Winter Solstice for a single day. A year later, the next solstice is coming, and everyone is wondering if the powers will return. Family and friends band together to plan a heist with their powers, led by the mysterious Prophet. There was a lot of potential in the ideas set up in Black Solstice, but ultimately it’s been three years without a sequel and I don’t anticipate that the story will go anywhere. It’s fun, but a lot of set up without any payoff, so I can’t really recommend it at this point in time.
Prince and Assassin by Tavia Lark
I had high hopes for this novel, but found it almost universally underwhelming. Lark wasn’t able to conjure a convincing portrait of either a playboy prince or a reluctant assassin, they fell in love too fast without any visible chemistry, and the thriller plotline (of both protecting the prince from other assassins and the assassin remaining hidden) was uneventful until the very end of the book. I probably would have DNF’d, except that I was waiting on library loans for more interesting audiobooks to come up. I’m not mad at this book, but I just can’t understand why it’s as popular as it is.
DNFs
Only two this month! It probably should have been 4-5, and one of my goals for a lot of my reading moving forward is to not finish books that I wouldn’t rate at least 3 stars or be excited to recommend to others. I probably won’t follow that however. Ironically, both of these books I dropped because they were too pushy about themselves.
Mad Sisters of Esi by Tasha Mehta
I get it. This is a whimsical book full of idiosyncrasies and oddness. You don’t need to keep reminding me! There were some interesting elements to this book (I really liked the focus on sisterly relationships as the core idea), but I just had no desire to pick it up again a few too many times. I let myself start a new book, which really cemented that I wanted to move on. It had the misfortune of coming right after Asunder, which also had some wild and bizarre worldbuilding, but integrated in a way that felt natural instead of forced.
Winging it With You by Chip Pons
I have a lot of tolerance for bullshit setups to romances. This pushed me too far in the ‘everything in my life sucks until I met you’. I know shitty exes are a trope, but you didn’t have to lay it on quite so thick. Ease up, let things feel more natural, and can we get some moderately well-adjusted protagonists for once? I probably could’ve handled this in November before my winter romance binge hit, but my tolerance is at it’s lowest as I slip more and more into hibernation until Christmas Hallmark movie season begins again.
What’s on the Horizon
r/Fantasy Bingo! Specifically, I plan on doing an Achillean and a Graphic Novels card again this year (probably), so I’ve been holding a bunch of those in reserve until they ‘count’ again. Perhaps not the best mentality towards hobby reading in the world, but it is what it is. Some books I’m especially looking forward to are
Plus a reread of The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez for my in person book club!
Marked for Plot 