User Profile

Otts

otts@books.theunseen.city

Joined 2 years, 3 months ago

I read 10-12 novels a week in grad school and some heavy literary theory. No interest in non-fiction now, and mainly read sci-fi and fantasy. Using this account to track/share my reading from 2023 onward (and maybe backward, if my completionist tendencies kick in). On Mastodon @ottsatwork@artsio.com.

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Otts's books

Marie-Helene Bertino: Beautyland (Hardcover, english language, 2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 3 stars

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, …

Life is better when you’re young

3 stars

Love the premise: a young girl realizes she’s an alien and reports on humanity via fax to her people on Planet Cricket Rice. But for this twist, it’s a Bildungsroman that’s much more enjoyable during her childhood vs. adult years. Two passages from the former, one involving her misophonia, truly made me cackle. There’s never a direct confirmation of her origins but her adulthood disappointed for me. Oh well.

Venita Blackburn: Dead in Long Beach, California (Hardcover, 2024, MCD) 5 stars

Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake …

Bad cover, great book

5 stars

A wholly original way of exploring grief that wasn’t depressing. Coral is a lesbian author who finds her brother dead by suicide, and begins responding to texts on his phone as him. Intercut with excerpts from her own dystopian novel and flashbacks from their family’s lives, this was hard to follow at times but always beautifully written. One of those I-love-how-your-mind-works authors, I-could-never.

Carrie Vaughn: The Naturalist Society (Hardcover, 2024, Amazon Publishing) 4 stars

In the summer of 1880, the death of Beth Stanley’s husband puts her life’s work …

Birds, bisexuals, and Bahamians, oh my!

2 stars

Really great premise that’s marred by a largely uninterrogated colonialist worldview: Arcane Taxonomy grants a portion of the magic from the thing that’s named. Primarily birds. Vaughn isn’t ignorant of the dynamics this creates for queers, women, and POC (our main characters), or that Western ways of knowing and naming aren’t the end-all, be-all. But the engine driving everything remains the will to conquer.

reviewed Drowned Country by Emily Tesh (The Greenhollow Duology, #2)

Emily Tesh: Drowned Country (Paperback, 2020, Tor.com) 3 stars

This second volume of the Greenhollow duology once again invites readers to lose themselves in …

Robbed of romance

3 stars

I enjoyed Book 1 of this duology more. The gay relationship isn’t where we left it, and the typical chopping up of a linear recounting of how it got there was jarring. I just wanted to enjoy them being together. The world continues to be interesting though, and the characters are still likable.

Samantha Harvey: Orbital (EBook, 2023, Grove Atlantic) 4 stars

A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize–winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation …

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space”

5 stars

A single day aboard the space station is 16 orbits of the Earth. A lovely book that takes a different approach to being in space: humanist, tenderness for all we are. Rare in the softness it treats the cold darkness of space, mainly stemming from its point of view above the Earth. Inhabiting a place of extreme contradictions, Harvey draws a circle around our hearts.

Louise Penny: The beautiful mystery (2012, St. Martin's Minotaur) 4 stars

No outsiders are ever admitted to the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, hidden deep in the wilderness …

Enough with the sandalwood

4 stars

Yay, we’re not in Three Pines for this one. Kind of a relief actually. But my fatigue with Penny’s formula in this series continues: Gamache’s brown eyes, his quiet, still manner, the corny quips with Beauvoir. 🙄 And the constant questions posed by the narrator that indicate: You are reading a mystery. Just ICYMI. We get it, girl. The larger story creeps along, though, and I’m here for it. The monks too.

reviewed Last first snow by Max Gladstone (Craft sequence -- [4])

Max Gladstone: Last first snow (2015) 5 stars

"Forty years after the God Wars, Dresediel Lex bears the scars of liberation--especially in the …

Read. This. Book.

5 stars

Incredible. Gladstone has this ability to write palpably and ephemerally so you catch the meaning even as it slips away. But leaving you with enough so you’re not frustrated or confused. He takes something as grounded as community organizing for housing, the pressures of development and business interests, and wraps it in Craft (magic), wars with gods, and so much more. I’m re-reading this whole series.

Nathan Tavares: Welcome to Forever (Paperback, 2023, Titan Books Limited) 3 stars

Fox is a memory editor – one of the best – gifted with the skill …

Needs editing

3 stars

Great portrayal of a gay relationship in a future where memories can be edited. Ironically, Tavares needs an editor himself. Way too many ideas, overly complex with pacing issues.

There’s some larger plot to save the whole world that isn’t needed; just focusing on these men and how they keep coming back to each other no matter the amount of editing is enough. Much better than Tavares’ first novel.