Reviews – Page 2 – Marked for Plot

The Girl With a Thousand Faces – Hong Kong Never Felt so Haunted

Sunyi Dean’s debut novel The Book Eaters is the type of story that I have spent three years thinking about. Needless to say, there was no question about whether or not I’d pick up her sophomore work. Craft remain Dean’s strength, as do characters that don’t quite line up with easy moral labels. However, I didn’t enjoy this nearly as much as The Book Eaters. As has been the case (and probably will continue for at least another week or two), lingering concussion effects are partly to blame. Not entirely though, I think.

The Premise:
At the end of World War II, Mercy found herself on an island outside Hong Kong with no memories. Thirty years later she is a ghost talker in the haunted Kowloon district, working for the leader of the Snakeskin Triad. She been seeing visions of a drowned woman, and they’re getting worse. It turns out that an evil spirit has very special plans for Mercy, and she’s not going to enjoy them one bit.

Read if You Like: haunting visuals, competent women in their 50s, casual queer representation, ghost cat sidekicks

Avoid if You Dislike: unconventional narrative structures, shifting POV (including 2nd person), depictions of drowning

Chai & Charmcraft -Cozy with a Side of Politics

For whatever reason, I’ve decided that this is the year I try and figure out what types of cozy fantasy I actually enjoy. It feels like there’s a ton out there in the mystery and/or small business owner space, ditto with cottagecore vibes. However, I’ve found that type of story hasn’t managed to hold my attention much. My favorites have all diverged from that formula pretty heavily. Chai and Charmcraft struck a similar chord to Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard and The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. It’s more saccharine than either of these, but retains some of the sharp edges and personal stakes that form the core of my cozy fantasy preferences.

The Premise:
Faraj is the God-Emperor’s brother, gifted with prophetic visions that make him invaluable to the throne. On a single night of indulgence, he chases a vision of a man tending a Jasmine plant that has followed him for decades. This leads him to a bathhouse/brothel in the Catspaw district where he meets Asharan, the keeper of the bathhouse. The two are smitten with each other, but their encounter quickly has implications far beyond what either of them ever intended. It doesn’t help that the night brings a cat-familiar into Faraj’s life, which are banned in the palace.

Read if You Like: the politics of gossip, indulging the joy of children, fat protagonists treated with dignity, catfolk who feel like cats

Avoid if You Dislike: extended conversations, overly-sweet dialogue and internal monologue, unconventional Romance plot structures

A Long and Speaking Silence – Delicious Food, Deficient Social Skills

The Empress of Salt and Fortune is one of my all-time favorites, and I have a lot of love for the Singing Hills Novellas. I actually use two of them in my high school genre fiction class for a novella-focused book club. They had some of my favorite explorations of how truth isn’t always a single idea, that a story is just as powerful as an action, and using framing narratives in novel and interesting ways. This book, like some of the other recent entries in the series, mostly lacks those elements. I implore you to set aside your expectations and come in open to something a bit different. I enjoyed the book a lot more once I gave up those comparisons – it was hard though.

This is technically #7 in a series, but the novellas are all independent and can be read in any order.

The Premise:
Chih is new to their job and has arrived in a river town preparing for a festival. Their purse is stolen, so they wait tables as waves of refugees enter the city. They collect stories, do their best to help others, and listen to the advice of Almost Brilliant. Mostly though, they’re desperately trying not to fuck up while they fake it until they make it.

Read If Looking For: mouthwatering food descriptions, a story focusing on Chih, sassy birds, the exhaustion of working multiple jobs

Avoid If Looking For: fresh examinations of refugee themes, explorations of truth and multiple perspectives

Villain – Psychologically Delightful

Hench is the book that relaunched my interest in Superhero media. It wasn’t the first to deconstruct whether or not the heroes are the good folks, not by any stretch of the imagination. However, it brought a modern take to the genre and reveled in delicious ambiguity. Villain was one of the releases I was most excited about this year. I think Hench is the stronger novel overall, but the highs in Villain are much more delicious and psychological.

This review will include plenty of spoilers for Hench, so I’d avoid continuing unless you’ve read it. See my review for that book here.

The Premise
Supercollider is nothing more than a ball of flesh, and isn’t long for this world. Leviathan and Anna (though now Auditor is more appropriate) have set their sights on The Draft, which is putting together a fresh response to the new strategies put forward by this villainous duo.

Read If You Like: the horror of involuntary medical procedures, competence porn, passing the point of no return, casual inclusion of mobility aids

Avoid If You Dislike: whiny antagonists, toxic romances, mandibles

The Open Era – An Earnest Romantic Drama

I am a shallow man. I see a pretty Sports Romance cover, and that’s enough for me to dive in headfirst. This is Edward Schmit’s debut novel, and he’s an author I’ll be eagerly awaiting more from! This wasn’t a perfect book, but it was such a contrast to Cut & Run that it made me feel optimistic about the state of m/m Romance. This is a much more raw book than Romances usually go for: id doesn’t lay the drama on too thick and hits strong emotional beats. It’s a balance can be hard to strike, but this one really worked for me.

The Premise:
Austin is the first openly gay male tennis player to compete in a Grand Slam. He’s excited to compete, but the media around his ‘historic accomplishments’ are making his anxiety attacks worse, and he’s also caught the eye of world #2 Diego. They’re set for a collision course in the tournament, but that doesn’t stop either of them from catching feelings.

Read if You Like: realistic characters, third act breakups that make sense, mental health as a focal point

Avoid if You Dislike: ghosting, protagonists who sometimes act like jerks, rushed timelines

Cut & Run – Look How Far We’ve Come

Cut & Run is a cult classic amongst the Queer Thriller crowd. It’s coming up on being two-decades old and recently got reprinted, so I knew I was going to pick it up. It has a reputation for being on the ‘mindless fun’ side of books, and it fit that brief delightfully. I’d been feeling a bit of burnout on reading, and this required so little brainpower that it started to fill my cup again. However, I also think it’s a good benchmark of what ‘well written’ gay love used to look like. It feels dated and a prime example of what happens when queer men are written with a straight female audience in mind.

This review will (in part) explore how this book gets writing queer men wrong. Many of these elements are frustrating patterns that still pop up in new releases. However, I want to anchor all of this with the idea that Roux & Urban were writing queer men long before it was seen as profitable, though they definitely profited. I wish we’d moved past the types of writing I found here, and I’m also thankful that they paved the way for better representation to follow.

I bear no ill will towards these authors and books, but this read was enough to convince me that I didn’t want to continue following these characters.

The Premise:
When a serial killer goes after the FBI agents investigating him, the Bureau takes an unusual step of assigning a new partnership to catch him. Ty is a loose cannon who recently fucked up a deep-cover case. Zane is a buttoned up agent from Cybercrimes who is trying to climb the ladder. They immediately decide they can’t stand each other.

Read if you Like: coworkers who hate and lust for each other, sexy fistfights, melodramatic serial killers, pulpy thrillers

Avoid if you Dislike: quality queer rep, there’s literally only one possible suspect, claustrophobia

10 Cover Artists I Can’t Get Enough Of

I know that a lot of fantasy readers have a fondness for the 90s era covers, which are largely out of style nowadays other than the Stormlight Archive books. Personally, I’m more of a fan of the illustrative style that kids books have been championing for years, and I cannot stand photographs of real humans on my books. The romance genre is guilty of this, and nothing could interest me less than a generic model torso. I wish I could say that covers didn’t matter for the books I pick out, especially since self-published authors are much less likely to have the budget to throw at a professional cover artist. However, I know I’ve avoided books for years that ended up being favorites because of bad covers (shout out to Red Dot by Mike Karpa!)

Because I’m not talking books, I’ll talk about artist names and link book covers to their websites instead of the Goodreads pages. Similarly, I’m limiting myself to novels only. Comic covers are a whole different beast, with traditions completely seperate from the prose books.

The Odyssey – Musings on the Movie

I saw The Odyssey with friends this weekend, and figured I’d throw my thoughts out there. As context, I haven’t read the original myth in a few years, so my memories of it are hazy. I was neither stunned at the movie’s magnificence nor appalled at how it butchered the original myth. With how many reviews are going around for this one, including many by those who are more intimately familiar with the myth than me, this likely won’t be super profound or original. I thought Nolan made some really smart choices, and some odd ones.

However, my main takeaway is that this should have been a single season TV show, and that the Movie format hindered Nolan more than anything else. Also, if we could get Connor Storie in an adaptation of Song of Achilles, that would be great.

If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light

Short Fiction anthologies generally don’t get much mainstream traction. Most genre fiction readers, myself included, tend to not pick them up. I never read them until I started participating in r/Fantasy’s bingo challenge and discovered that they can be really incredible. If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light had been getting mentions in both genre fiction and short form circles. It’s a translated work from Korean, and I’m trying to read more work not published in English, admittedly in a very unfocused way. This collection won’t rank in my favorites, but I think people who are more ardent science fiction fans will enjoy it, while people who primarily see themselves as fantasy people – like me – may resonate less with it.

Broad Overview:
This anthology of science fiction is thematically focused on belonging and personal connections in a world that is set up to push people apart. Oddly, it has an emotionally distant style. The closest analogues in English are some of the older science fiction writing that cared more about exploring an interesting premise than the modern conception of stories and characters. This didn’t necessarily work the best for me, despite plenty of interesting ideas that Cho-yeop dove into. Unlike the older US sci fi, there isn’t a consistent desire for the technology or aliens to be realistic and intricately detailed. Instead, Cho-yeop seems more interested in presenting ideas and their ripple effects rather than exploring the underlying logic supporting the technology and biology that each story focuses on.

Novella Readathon #s 31-32: The Curse Bearer Duology

As a middle school English teacher, I get swamped with essays and book reports about Percy Jackson and comparable titles. This means I sometimes grow weary of gods and monsters in the modern world, especially if they lend themselves to a more lighthearted or comedic romp of a story. I avoided When Among Crows mostly because I found Roth’s Divergent books to be fine, but relatively unremarkable in the crowded YA dystopia landscape. However, this book hit generally settled in a much better spot for a more mature look at a similar idea. If you’re looking for a story based on Slavic folklore with a bit of action, a bit of character development, and a bit of spookiness, this will be a satisfying read. I thought it was a hair predictable and lacked a wow factor, but I immediately put the sequel on hold with my local library. A much shorter summary of my thoughts about the sequel are at the end of this review.

Read If Looking For: Baba Jaga, monsters that typically don’t get much screen time, secrets in every backstory

Avoid If Looking For: plot twists you don’t see coming, deep internal monologues, realistic portraits of queer men