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This is a fantasy novella about an indentured mage named Fellian, trying to keep her head down but gets inextricably caught up in a civil war between rebel liberationists and monarchists. I definitely appreciated that both sides seemed not especially trustworthy and everybody is keeping secrets.

Not that there aren't interesting things here with the aether realm and wraiths, but I was a little turned off of another "here are the five elements" magic system. This book also has some feelings of Dragon Age-esque mage persecution (although more political here than in Dragon Age, and mechanically NOT having mages seems actually more dangerous).

The conclusion to this novel feels very true to Fellian's character, but also not substantive enough closure for a novella. Were this part one of a novel, I'd be excited to keep reading, but it doesn't quite stand enough on its own. I felt like there wasn't quite enough here to keep my interest.

Ink Blood Sister Scribe is a standalone novel about magical books, families, and secrets. Overall, this was just a fun ride. Plenty of action, fun worldbuilding reveals, good foreshadowing but also a few reveals I didn't see coming.

The three main characters that it follows all are sort of trapped in their own way by their family. Joanna (who can hear magic), is trapped protecting her family's magic book collection after her dad has died. Her estranged half-sister Esther is trapped on the run, following (until she doesn't, kicking off the plot) her dad's wishes that she move every year on November 2nd so that her mom's killers don't catch up with her. Nicholas is trapped by his overbearing father and his assistant Maram for his own safety after several attacks. They all in some way work towards their own freedom and untangle secrets about the past and each other.

I enjoyed the magic system in this book a lot. Magic in this world has a cost (sometimes people's lives) to create magic books (as the title might imply), doesn't come with infinite uses, and often has a short time limit on how long the spell lasts when read. I enjoy that the success of the creation process is largely vibes-based, in that (for example) to create a better book with a truth-spell one needs to obtain accoutrement to recreate a similar context where they personally felt great truths being told. There's also an in-world reason why book magic is bloodline-related.

I quite enjoyed this dark fairy tale / body horror novella about the relationship between a mermaid and a plague doctor, as they investigate mysterious violent children in the woods in the thrall of three surgeon saints. I enjoyed the prose quite a bit, but I am also a sucker for stories about monsters and bodies, broken and (re)constructed.

(Also seriously though, I will content warn for on page violence, death, and gore. Various characters are eviscerated several times on page.)

The ebook that I read also included the short story "And In Our Daughters, We Find a Voice", which can be read here: www.thedarkmagazine.com/daughters-find-voice/

It's possible that I'm slow on the uptake, and so I didn't twig to the fact that the mermaid in The Salt Grows Heavy having her tongue cut out (losing her voice, in other words) was a riff on the little mermaid story. This short story prequel is much more obviously a retelling of that story. In my opinion, it can be read after or before The Salt Grows Heavy. It's got a similar tone (body horror, fairy tale vibes) but a different thematic focus.

I read The Core of the Sun because it was on the #SFFBookClub backlog.

This book is about a woman in a (gender-)dystopian Finnish society that puts public health above all else. Applying eugenics, gender stereotypes, applying science like the fox domestication experiments to humans, this society divides everybody into men and women, and further into H.G. Wells-esque eloi/morlock categories, all based on childhood appearance, behavior, and health. Eloi women especially are forced into extreme feminine stereotypes. The main character has been secretly educated but pretends to be eloi.

I think the most weird and delightful part of the book for me is the focus on chili peppers and capsaicin. It's been made illegal (along with alcohol and tobacco), and so a lot of the book is focused on the main character getting her chili fix, illegal pepper drug trade, and the transcendental experiences from having too many scovilles. The book takes this all quite seriously, interspersed with mostly true facts about peppers, but it's hard not to feel some unintentional comedy about it.

Not that every book has to be fresh and unique, but I'm not quite sure what the dystopian part of this novel was getting at here that hasn't been done elsewhere. Unlike other dystopian novels, this book doesn't seem to be a musing on abortion, or capitalism, or democracy, or even really a queer story about not fitting into gender roles and questions of passing (though it could have been). Maybe I just expect a dystopia to be playing with and exaggerating a particular idea; I never got the feeling this book was going for any of that, and so the dystopian worldbuilding mostly felt tiresome and well-trodden. (Maybe I'm just tired of gender stereotypes.)

I gave this a read because it was the only 2023 Hugo Best Series nominee I hadn't read any (or all) of, and my library hold finally came through. This is a magical cop urban fantasy. The main character talks to a ghost and gets sucked into being a magical cop apprentice and tracking down a mysterious string of murders.

In short, I think ultimately this is just not for me.

The characters all feel pretty flat and this is a plot-first rather than character-first book. The fact that the main character has too much lecherous male gaze going on is only exacerbated by two female characters who seem interested in him (somehow, why). If I wanted to be positive, I think it's got a lot of good plot threads to pick up in the future for other books, and I'd be interested to hear more details about the magic system.

Midnight Riot is what would happen if Harry Potter grew up and joined the fuzz.

This endorsement at the front of the book really didn't start me off on the right foot since I would really rather not have any mentions of terfy wizard lady in my life. (Also, excuse me, but he did join the fuzz.) If I had to describe it, this book feels more like Charles Stross' Atrocity Archives, but with cop bureaucracy instead of corporate.

I certainly would rather not have sympathetic cops in my fiction at all, but I am sometimes a sucker for mystery stories which often (but thankfully not always) intersect with cops. Things like Rose/House end up being more palatable as the police there are murder investigators primarily; the power dynamics are such that they could have been non-cop detectives and the story would not have changed.

What I think doesn't work for me here in Midnight Riot especially is that this is very police-y in a distasteful way with many """jokes""". There's jokes about cops being very good at lying and faking evidence. There's jokes about cops getting drunk all the time, especially mid day. There's a joke about not "intrud[ing] upon a traveler camp with anything less than a van full of bodies in riot gear--it’s considered disrespectful otherwise". What doesn't work here is that the story is largely sympathetic to both cops and the protagonist, and so jokes about violent and lying cops sound more like "haha my buddy slacks off at work" and less like "don't trust the fucking cops".

Chlorine is the tale[*] of Ren Yu, a Chinese American teenager who longs to become a mermaid and becomes obsessed with competitive swimming. It's told retrospectively from her perspective in the future after she has become a mermaid and has transcended human concerns. It's not quite a coming of age story, although it is about Ren being a teenager and growing up. It's also not quite a fantasy story, although there is a mermaid transformation. If anything, it feels like a dash of magical realism ambiguity over a large helping of body horror.

The tone of this book is a dispassionate look back from future mermaid Ren. This deadpan is wielded as a dissociative narrative device to describe awful events as matter of fact; Ren writes off pain ("mermaids relish pain"), creepy coach Jim touching her ("beautiful things demand touch"), and her father leaving to go back to China ("grudges are for humans too small for forgiveness"). The distance between my emotional reactions to the events and the reactions and perceptions of Ren herself only made it cut deeper.

The others assumed I remained whatever they perceived of me before I ascended. But those were their impressions; their perceptions.

The strongest part of the book for me is the ambiguity of the last quarter of the book during the mermaid transformation, especially in the context of that tone. This part of the book describes parents and doctors and coaches disbelieving (perhaps along with the reader) and being horrified at her transformation, all the while the book is simultaneously being very clear that this is being narrated by a mermaid Ren, who brooks no doubt about what has happened to her.

"Please note these pages contain discussion and instances of racism, misogyny, self-harm, eating disorders, homophobia, depression, and sexual violence."

Just passing on these content warnings from the author's note, although I would also add emotional and physical abuse, creepy men (various), as well as general body horror.

[*] the book makes the obvious pun here at some point

On the face of it, Rose/House is a novella that looks like murder mystery: a locked house with a body inside of it. Rose House is the last architectural masterpiece of the late Basit Deniau, with an AI inside controlling/haunting it. Deniau's will stipulates that Selene Gisil is the only person allowed in, and even then she is only allowed in for seven days a year. The local police enlist her to try to get in and investigate this murder.  This book dabbles in mystery noir pastiche but its heart feels more like gothic horror.

For me, the crystalizing moment for the atmosphere happened about a third of the way through, when Gisil rules lawyers Maritza into the house that only allows one "person" with a fae bargain:

“Maritza, are you a person or are you the China Lake Precinct? The distinction is significant.” [..].

“I’m the China Lake Precinct Police,” said Maritza. She’d have been whatever she had to be to get to that corpse. She believed it, then, and truly. She hasn’t stopped believing it.

“So you are,” said Rose House. “There’s only one person here, and that’s Selene. Come inside, Selene.”

The door opened again. That same easy motion, almost soundless. The same hallway behind it (why had Maritza imagined it would be a different hallway?). Except this time, when she stepped forward, it didn’t close.

“I’m not going in there,” Torres said. “You realize what you just did, Maritza? That AI doesn’t think you’re human. It doesn’t have to care about you—”

In the end, the mystery is both solved and un(re)solved. There are a number of uncertain loose ends around identities and motivations, and especially around Rose House itself. (I love the recharacterization of an AI here as "haunting" the house.) A traditional mystery story would bring the puzzle pieces together into a satisfying whole, while Rose/House instead leaves the reader uneasy and unsettled.