Reviews – Page 23 – Marked for Plot

The Wings Upon Her Back

This book wasn’t really on my radar until a variety of people whose taste I trust recommended it as a fantastic thematic exploration of Fascism, Military Dehumanization, Religious Programming, and Abusive Relationships. I was hesitant about the mix of fantasy and mecha elements, but it ended up being a really enjoyable read that I anticipate being nominated for at least a few awards.

Elevator Pitch:
Zenya is an apprentice with the sect of the Mecha God, desperate to earn the approval of her mentor and prove that her roots in the Scholar sect won’t hold her back as a future warrior and enforcer. Decades later and now named Zemolai, she finds herself disgraced, wings ripped from her back and cast out for a single infraction. Zemolai grapples with her faith as she reflects on how she ended up participating in a system that, from the outside, doesn’t protect the city and citizens like it promises to.

Read If Looking For: theme-focused novels, fantasy about religion and politics, nuanced relationships

Avoid if Looking For: action heavy books, fleshed out side characters

The Bullet Swallower

The intersection between Speculative Fiction and Westerns is something I’ve been interested in exploring for a while now. I’ve got both American Hippo and Make Me No Grave on my bookshelf right now, waiting for me to find the time to get around to them. This was my first foray into the genre, primarily because the Magical Realism elements were intriguing, as was the parallel storyline in the pitch.

The Premise:
The Bullet Swallower primarily follows the bandit Antonio Sonoro, the descendent of a long line of tyrants and despots. He’s chasing after the score to end all scores, but quickly ends up trapped in a cycle of survival, hunting, and being hunted. Seventy years later, Jaime Sonoro, a movie star, is gifted a book chronicling his family’s cruel history. And lingering above it all is Remedio, a being who knows the men are damned, and can do nothing to escape the twisted fate of the Sonoro family.

Read If Looking For: frank depictions of characters, family sagas, heaps of bravado

Avoid if Looking For: fast paced stories, lots of action scenes

Mistress of Lies

One of this year’s bingo squares is ‘Judge a Book by It’s Cover’ which challenges you to read a book without knowing anything other than what’s on the front cover. Mistress of Lies was my pick for my ‘published in 2024’ themed card. I thought the art was wonderfully evocative, and also visually distinct from a lot of cover art trends I’m seeing these days. Ella Garrett (designer) and Felix Abel Klaer (illustrator) did a phenomenal job.

The Premise:
In a country ruled by an upper class of blood mages and led by a deathless king, a young noblewoman kills her father. She wants to change society for the betterment of her brother, who is Bloodless, and relies on scheming and plots to do so. Meanwhile, a Bloodless commoner stumbles upon a murder victim that has been causing discontentment amongst the Bloodless people, fostered by whispers of rebellion. He finds himself dragged into noble society against his will. And lingering around it all is the Royal Bloodworker, forming a trilogy of attraction as the three struggle to find an equilibrium in the newly unsettled Blood Worker Society.

Read If Looking For: romantic tension, polyamorous storylines, moral ambiguity

Avoid if Looking For: political intrigue, books free of YA/New Adult vibes

The Woods All Black

Horror, especially queer horror, is something that I’ve been dipping my toes in more and more as I get older. I’m a squeamish person; during medical shows I look away during surgery scenes, and I despise jump scares. But I find both elements much more manageable in book form. And The Woods All Black was a wonderful marriage of queer history and queer horror. At 150 pages, it was an easy choice to pick up.

The Premise:
Leslie is a frontier nurse. Having served as a nurse in the First World War, he now visits remote towns to provide medical care, oftentimes presenting as a woman to make others more comfortable, and keep himself safe. He finds himself at Spar Creek which, despite inviting him to come provide care, now treats him with extreme frostiness. Something unnatural is going on in this town, but the biggest threat might be the preacher, who sets his sights on Leslie immediately.

Read If Looking For: Appalachian settings, queer history, religious horror

Avoid if Looking For: engaging romances, lots of supernatural content

Cascade Failure

I picked up Cascade Failure after seeing it compared to Firefly favorably in a few different places, and I am unabashedly a fan of the cult-hit TV show, even if I was rather late getting on the bandwagon. We’ve seen misfit underdog spacheship crews a million times before, but I enjoy books that tread familiar ground just as much as I enjoy those which innovate in the genre. While this book wasn’t particularly original, it does evoke the feeling of Firefly much better than anything I’ve read before.

The Premise:
The Ambit is a spaceship captained by an AI with only two other crew members: a war-torn veteran seeking escape and an augmented mechanic who likes her plasma torch a bit too much. Then Jal stumbles into their ship, on the run from his past as a deserter. On their way back to the central system, the ship gets pinged with an emergency beacon, and everything quickly falls apart. Expect to spend more time exploring crew relationships than the action, as family life on the ship takes center stage until the final parts of the book.

Read If Looking For: found family, touching moments, AI characters

Avoid if Looking For: fast paced stories, in-depth Sci Fi worlbuilding

The Daughter’s War

This book is a prequel to The Blacktongue Thief, which was a story that I enjoyed, especially for some of its worldbuilding elements. However, I had some issues with the pacing of the book. It was engaging enough that The Daughter’s War, with its promise of brutal goblins, an engaging central character, and horror elements, was a powerful draw. In the end I liked it more than Blacktongue Thief, and the books can be read independently of each other.

The Premise:
It is the third goblin war. Horses are practically extinct, as are most of the men. Galva marches with a cohort of other women warriors, part of a new experimental corvid unit. Their monstrous birds were bred by wizards to kill the goblin horde, for the ‘biters’ fear one thing: birds. But war is brutal, and nobody comes out unscathed. From the very first page, you know exactly how much Galva is going to lose, but the journey is one hell of a ride.

Read If Looking For: scary goblins, scary birds, mysterious wizards, the horrors of war

Avoid if Looking For: cinematic action scenes, traditional hero’s journeys

Rakesfall

The Saint of Bright Doors (Chandrasekera’s first novel) has been raking up award nominations from pretty much every major award, whether it be popular vote, juried, or a combination. It’s also a book I enjoyed quite a bit. I initially hadn’t because weirdly enough psychadellic tracings of two lovers across timelines/memories/reincarnations/whatever is weirdly popular in 2024 releases (see Welcome to Forever, Emperor and the Endless Palace, and Principle of Moments), and I’d already read a few. However, when comparisons to one of my favorite novels of all time, The Spear Cuts Through Water, were made by some reviewers, I knew it was time to give this acid-trip of a book a try.

The Premise
The cover blurb from another author calls this a ‘fearless hallucinatory novel’ and I think that’s about as good of a description as I can give. It traces two souls reincarnating further and further into the future, with a tight focus on Sri Lanka. Each of the ten parts is written in a different mode, or style, such as people in a TV watching a TV show where they are a documentary watched by the characters, a play performed about things that happen in the future, and mad semi-poetic allegorical ramblings about the color red.

Read If Looking For: Experimental Literary Fiction, layered metaphors, books that benefit from easy access to encyclopedias and dictionaries

Avoid if Looking For: light or mildly difficult reads, anything remotely straightforward in plot or structure

The Emperor and the Endless Palace

Reincarnation and recursive gay romance books seem to be a running theme of 2024 releases. I didn’t read all of them, but The Emperor and the Endless Palace seemed like the type of gay romance that was going to push past the cliches plaguing gay romances both in and out of fantasy spaces at the moment. And despite some classic debut-novel issues, it was exactly what I was looking for.

The Premise:
Two men, soulmates, find each other across various lifetimes. Dong Xian is a clerk at the Endless Palace 2,000 years ago, scheming for power. He Shican is something of a lost soul, an innkeeper in the woods of China in the 1700s. And River, who immigrated to America as a young child, is has recently come out and is exploring his identity in the hedonistic LA queer community. As their stories progress, so too do they intersect, replay, and unravel.

Read If Looking For: romances that aren’t quite Romances, looping narratives, lustful gay men, historical queer representation

Avoid if Looking For: saccharine queer stories, or books that aren’t romance heavy

The Storm Beneath the World

As and English teacher, I constantly tell my kids not to judge a book by its cover. Dumb advice, but I have to try to get them to give Tamora Pierce a try somehow. It’s also undoubtedly true that a good cover is far more likely to get me to actually look at a book and give it a shot, and great cover artists are hard to find (especially since they and the authors rarely get a lot of say in what the cover looks like). And I’m ashamed to say that, with two horrible covers, I didn’t give The Storm Beneath the World a shot the first few times I saw it. Eventually, the premise of excellent fantasy featuring insect-people got me to pick it up, and thank goodness people kept hyping it. I’m now happy to say that it has a third, much better cover (for my tastes at least), and I think epic fantasy fans will find a lot to love here.

Elevator Pitch:
The world is a river of wind, through which continents on the back of ancient tentacle creatures host countries of insect-folk with some serious aristocracy issues. Four POV characters discover their Talent, a unique skill your are a prodigy at, but that has a serous dark side. Talents can be … well anything. Pottery, farming, conjuring fire, being lucky, sensing lies, etc. But using Talents overloads your brain with bliss leading to addiction, religious and social ostracization, and the promise of a relatively quick death as you ignore basic life needs to live in the bliss of your Talent. But with war looming as the Mad Queen Yil’s island approaches, these four protagonists find themselves pressed into service of Queen Nysh, putting their powers to use for the good of their society.

Read If Looking For: classic epic fantasy style writing in a totally alien setting, insect characters, ethical quandaries

Avoid if Looking For: books that avoid brutal violence, books with familiar settings

An Academy for Liars

Dark Academia isn’t a subgenre I read a lot of. I tend to prefer my magic school stories on the kid-side of things. But when this year’s bingo card asked me to dive into a Dark Academia, I started looking for a 2024 release that would satisfy me. An Academy of Liars seemed like fun, and I had a great time with it, even if I had some issues with the book’s execution.

The Premise
Lennon’s life is in pieces when she’s invited to Drayton, a college secluded in time and space for those who have the gift to persuade people (and reality itself) to bend to her will. She just fled an engagement with a cheating fiancé, is in the midst of a sever mental health crisis, and is looking to reinvent her life. While there, she meets a hot tattooed professor who becomes her advisor, and discovers that she’s got abilities that the everyone is jealous and terrified of. Oh, and the school and all its inhabitants are all harboring dark secrets. Fun times!

Read If Looking For: Dark Academia with a romance focus, fast paced books, rats named Gregory

Avoid if Looking For: healthy relationship dynamics, quality mental health rep, books that will make you think