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I'm not a classics person, so I'm surprised that this is fun. It's also super hard to follow though!

It's good! It's also not a sequel to Uprooted. And it's possibly the first time I read fantasy that has Jewish people and culture. (It also has antisemitism.) Also, it starts out as a story about money, and I'd never have expected to like such a thing. I got a little bored towards the end, but not too much.

I found out about this book because I saw mcc talking about it.

Slow Gods is a weird little book. It's about space politics, focusing around an impending supernova event that is going to wipe out many planets. It's from the perspective of Mawukana, who is just a pilot and seemingly exists more on the edges of the story, and yet is also ultimately at the heart of things.

I wonder whether it is possible to exist as a person at all without measuring yourself against others. I wish sometimes that I was strong enough to be myself in company without company turning me into something else. I wonder who that person would be, and am sometimes grateful never to find out.

Maw is also an odd, monstrous protagonist. He is not particularly driven, and is affected strongly by the expectations of others. It's not that he doesn't have feelings, but more that many times he needs to be gently nudged into action by the people around him.

As a narrator, Maw also likes to periodically intersperse some anthropological digressions on the nature of ritual, or arcspace pilots, or gender across various societies. It can be a blunt instrument for worldbuilding, but it's in character for Maw as a curious academic. It's also always just long and infrequent enough to fill in some details or whet my own curiosity, and this style works for me.

Ultimately, this is a story about grief and death and connection. It's a caricature of capitalism and the ineffectiveness of ways that countries (fail to) confront capitalist empires. I was gripped by it the whole way through and quite enjoyed it.

(Of course that's wildly unfair towards this book. It explores topics like personhood and property and violence and care with a lot of nuance. Still, it is also pretty boring.)

It's a sweet story, but also pretty boring.

A weird little book about a family of folks who help maintain the underlying mechanisms and physics of the universe. It's a multidimensional romp through familial trauma, abuse, and food.

(Seriously though, there are so many luscious food descriptions in this book. On top of just normal meals, Daniel is also constantly manifesting his reports as delicious food that need to be consumed to read them.)

The book is a bit over the top, and the folks working for "good" here are always incredibly overpowered for any and all situations that imperil them. The opening scene where Ellie dismantles the janky secret machine that is keeping her mom alive (but also destabilizing physics) is a great opening. I think the strength of this book are in the sibling dynamics between Ellie and Chris, but it's almost so much that it's hard for it not to feel shallow.

Yeah no I don't get classics. I dozed through most of this, since I didn't want to properly start Silvia Moreno-Garcias "The Daughter of Doctor Moreau" without knowing it at all. Done, moving on.

Oof. So, this is the least frustrating of the 3 McConaghy books I've read so far! There was really only one development that felt deeply unsatisfying. I definitely recommend this one if you don't want to tear out your hair over how wrong everything goes. Still, a lot does go wrong, and bad things like climate change, death and violence are central to the story.

This was on the #SFFBookClub poll but never got picked.

The Bewitching is three intertwined stories that all revolve around witchcraft. In 1998, struggling grad student Minerva is researching Beatrice Tremblay who wrote a novel the Vanishing roughly based on the disappearance of her friend Virginia. The second thread is that Minerva gets a chance to read Beatrice's journals, and so we hear Beatrice's perspective of mysterious and traumatic events of 1934. The final thread is Minerva's great-grandmother Alba who tells Minerva a story on her deathbed about events from her childhood in 1908.

At night the three of them talked on ICQ about meaningless and profound topics.

I am a sucker for parallel stories, but I especially love how rooted each of these different narratives are in highly specific times and places.

As a horror story, the pacing reminded me a lot of her previous book Mexican Gothic. There's a slow foreshadowing of creeping horror where things are going slightly awry (or maybe it's coincidence). And then, very late, there is a mask off moment where it's explicit what is happening. Having three intertwined stories that each have their own arc of tension only makes this stronger.

I'm excited for this one

For a while, I wasn't sure if I liked the story, but i certainly liked the way it was told, by watercolor and creepy insects. In the end, huge amounts of insect body horror later, I did like the story, and found it deeply satisfying.