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@Barbarius@outside.ofa.dog It might just be me, but I am willing to separate in my mind the llm airquotes ai of 2026 and the magical ai of science fiction. It may be the same word, but they don't occupy the same function and I also don't feel like there's a line between the two explicitly in this book (as compared to Counterweight).

AD Sui's previous book The Dragonfly Gambit was quite good, so I was excited to read this next book by them.

The plot hook: Vessel Iris, a monk that specializes in laying to rest those who have died in space, is assigned to a lost generation ship that has suddenly appeared. Surprisingly, there is a team of researchers there already. And then people start dying. Dun dun dunnn.

Unsurprisingly, this book most reminded me of something like Ghost Station by SA Barnes. The part of Ghost Station that I most enjoyed was the ambiguity in the horror elements. What is actually going on? Who can be trusted? Can the narrator even be trusted? In Iron Garden Sutra, there is a little bit of early misdirection, but I didn't believe it for a second and the larger plot arc truth felt clearly foreshadowed. This knowledge caused it to lose a lot of tension and weakened the horror side of the story.

What I did really like about this book is how the two major characters have slowly revealed backstory and trauma that intertwines with each other and the greater plot going on. It's also got a similar enemies-to-lovers vibe that was in the previous AD Sui book, and the strength of this one too is absolutely in the characters and their relationships.

It is (apparently?) the first book in a series, so I'm quite curious where it will go from here in terms of plot and genre. There's a lot of space (:drum:) for any number of story directions.

My bias is clear: I will read everything Katherine Addison writes, especially in the Goblin Emperor world. This is a short treasure-hunting novella backgrounded by elitist academia and complicated relationships. As always, her books are carried by her characters.

I love a book about treasure hunting where the titular treasure is found halfway through the book, but that's also not the end of the mystery.

I'm also going to steal this thought from one of my friends because I could not agree more: "I love the things that these books say about friendships, the different shapes both friendship and love can take (and that they're not mutually exclusive things; and that those two things can both exist in deeply healthy ways, absent sexual desire, etc. etc.)"

This book was really frustrating to listen to. It's very clear that the author wants people to embrace the concept of mutual aid and in in the last third of the book or so actually goes into a lot of strategies for running mutual aid groups and looking after your emotional well-being more generally and all of those things were really good actually.

Unfortunately the whole beginning of the book spends a lot of time vilifying any kind of aid that's done through mutual aid, talks about mutual aid as if it's The Solution, and pretty consistently has awkward undertones of ableism? I'm actually somewhat incredulous over the majority of the book was spent saying the same thing over and over again in very black and white terms, when social movement anything is definitely not black and white, and just being arrogantly pedantic for the majority of the book. The vilification of basically any kind of support that isn't done through mutual aid and assumptive attitudes regarding how and why people volunteer through organizations that aren't run with mutual aid principles was really grating, especially considering immediately after all of that, The author basically outlines that all of the same problems can happen with mutual aid groups. Also the pretty consistent badmouthing of people with specialized skills.

Kind of a waste since under all the superficial explanations, there was information of real value, especially when it came to offering suggestions on how to effectively be involved in mutual aid organizations and organize yourselves through cooperative leadership. The book just feels like it was really sloppily done, and I recognize that it's not long, but given that at least half of the book was one thing being said over and over again, I'm sure there was room to speak with more nuance if that had been what was desired.

I wouldn't really recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about mutual aid unless they already had a pretty solid foundation in the basics of social movements.

@klara@wandering.shop oh heck yeah!!! I wasn't sure that was a real film, although there are so many real books referenced that I'm not terribly surprised. Thanks for sharing your review, I'll put this on my movie list for sure.

To Ride a Rising Storm is the second book in Moniquill Blackgoose's Nampeshiweisit series, an indigenous story about dragons, colonizers, and fantasy dragon school. This was a lot of fun to read, but this felt like mostly open-ended setup for a future book rather than a cohesive story on its own. The ongoing threat in the first book is that if Anequs doesn't pass her classes then her dragon Kasaqua will be killed. The threat in the second book is... question mark??

This book is still a school story at its heart, but it gets a little bit more into larger politics of the world than the first book was able to. The Ravens of Joden are clearly the "hearken back to the whiter past" dissidents, but simultaneously the Jarl in power working against the Ravens is removing their representatives, adding surveillance and preventing free movement on Anequs's island, and suppressing dissent everywhere. It feels like there's some room for nuance about Anequs choosing to support neither of these powers (in some future book). All of this is great.

The polyamory angle is more nuanced than I would have expected to get from a young adult book. Anequs is interested in both Liberty (a black school servant) and Theod (a fellow indigenous dragoneer classmate). This is my own personal beef with other fiction (YA specifically), but I really dislike love triangles that turn into jealousy subplots and it's a relief that there's none of that here. I like that all three of them are very different people with different needs. Theod is afraid of not living up to Anglish morals and would prefer marriage. Anequs wishes she could bring everybody back to her home island where these sorts of relationships are supported, but also wants nothing to do with marriage right now. Liberty knows she could never marry Anequs and dreams of her own place to live above a shop (and definitely not Anequs' island).

As a reader it's easy to root for Anequs to just follow her heart, but Theod and Liberty both bring their own pragmatism about the world they're living in and the precarity of their social relationships. One small detail I also appreciate that this book has the three of them asking about kissing (and sometimes even declining). Maybe it feels too adult and communication-forward, but it makes it very comfy to me.

I enjoyed the book, but the pacing was extremely unexpected. I remarked to myself while reading that I was on page 270/440 and Anequs is still in the first week of classes learning about in-universe atomic bonds without there being any real conflict yet. This book is characterized by ongoing simmering background political tension while setting up a lot of ongoing plotlines. The first big event that feels like a payoff of the tension happens outside of the school, away from Anequs, most of the way through the book. Then, only in the final chapter or two does the final ball scene escalate into something more substantial. I don't know that I would recommend reading this book until the next book is out.

I quite enjoyed this book that plumbs the emotional waters of an estrangement between the narrator Yoella and her daughter Leah. The writing (in translation from Hebrew) is delicious and full of meandering sentences. I love the way that Yoella reads a lot and so this book itself can explicitly reference other texts.

It's a book focusing on the relationship between Yoella and Leah, but it's also about motherhood and family in general--that motherhood is forgetting, what love actually means and can look like, and about constructing narratives of the past and of each other. Somehow Yoella manages to be utterly open in dissecting her feelings and her past, but simultaneously unreliable and self-deceiving.

But stories about mothers and daughters are always in media res, working backward to the beginning, even as there is no beginning. The path is simple yet crooked, the beginning slinks ever further away. As with the universe or numbers, there is no beginning.

In the first dozen pages, Yoella describes a Scandanavian movie where a beautiful family experiences a brief avalanche; the avalanche never comes close to touching the family but in the pivotal seconds of danger, the father runs away while the mother protects the children, and this is the crack in the family. The rest of the movie is about the rift that this "easily made yet unforgivable mistake" creates, told with Swedish restraint. This movie, told in reverse, is the best description of the book that I can give.

I have a few more minor rambling thoughts about Litany for a Broken World too, which I'll separate out into this comment.

This is my own fault for coming into a book with expectations, but the blurb I read focuses on three strangers. I was thus a bit surprised that all nine major characters in the book (including the dog!) get their own point of view chapters, and this jumping around didn't quite work for me as a reader. It felt a bit unfocused to me, but maybe it worked well for some other reader. Additionally, Harnett getting his own chapter also removed some of the ambiguity around Jace and Corinne's conflict. It would have been more effective for me to have him be a bit of an enigma (and fill in his backstory later, if needed).

Jace and Corinne's conflict was really intriguing to me, but I feel like the resolution fizzled. There's betrayal, mistrust, and ambiguity about the nature of the Network, RDD, and Harnett. But then there's a moment during the climax, where Harnett repeats the facts that Corinne believes (as far as I could tell), and Corinne suddenly wonders "is this actually true?" without much reason at all. It didn't feel like a believable moment of doubt to me.

Finally, I do love a multiverse story, but I wish a little that there had been more explanation or differentiation in the other worlds. I don't know that they quite felt that different or unique. Is the handwave at "you can't travel to any world that's too close" the way that you don't meet your own self in another world? Mostly I have just seen a number of stories doing this sort of thing, and so I'm intrigued about the mechanics of this universe. This book just doesn't really get into any of them.

There's a lot of neat things going on in this book, but there's also a number of things that didn't quite land for me. I'm struggling to have a solid opinion, so here's a mishmash of drive-by thoughts.

I do love this book's thematic mantra of fixing broken things. It's clear that many characters in this book are broken (emotionally), and it's clear that the Boston timeline is broken (structurally, via capitalism largely), but it's less clear to me what sort of fixing is truly going on, especially in a multiverse sense.

Obviously Martin, Stirling, and Melissa are putting in work for their community, but the rest of it just seems like talk (or something a future book in the series will get to). I wish there was more clarity about how Jace had broken his oath to repair the broken parts of the universe, and what that oath actually means to Jace and Corinne. (Has Harnett sworn this same oath? Also, what is this oath as compared to the Network's "greatest good" motto??)

I think the pacing of the end of the book is also a little harmed by this being part of a series. There's clearly a climactic confrontation, but it largely feels unresolved, leaving lots of pieces for the future.

This sounds like a lot of complaints, but I enjoyed my read here. I do love a telepathic dog. I love the idea of talking to a therapist about portals to other worlds. I love Jace and Corinne working together for a shared goal while also being so misaligned. I love Martin still working to care for Reina even when Reina is not his sister. Overall, my favorite part of this book was all of the characters.

(This was the #SFFBookClub book for March 2026.)

Does anyone want a “cozy” story about the grief of disappointing your friends, and the agony of saying “no”?

Maybe it's my age, but I think I can always deeply appreciate a story centered on the idea of a change in life direction--there's a job that's consumed you to the point of you making it your identity and suddenly it's taken away from you (see: Bujold's Memory), or where a fulfilling job that your family and friends all expect you to do that has lost its luster, or when you've been doing the same job for hundreds of years and who would you even be if you weren't doing that. I am just a sucker for stories about new directions.

It's not that Viv wasn't changing her life in Legends & Lattes, but she wasn't really struggling against herself: she knew she wanted to hang up her sword and open a fantasy coffee shop. It doesn't quite resonate the same way as Fern's struggle does in this book, and it makes this book much stronger. Honestly, I most appreciate that this Travis Baldree book has an answer to the "how do I change my life when it's not working" question that doesn't end directly in fantasy small business. I also appreciate that Astryx and Fern are both thematically struggling with their own relationships with their own work, and have different answers to that question.

This is still a fluffy story (and if L&L wasn't your thing, I don't know that I'd recommend this one to you), but this is absolutely the strongest book in the trilogy for me.

Additional minor rambling:

Because Zyll is an uncontainable goblin menace and Astryx is on a hopeless quest to contain her while somehow bringing her to justice, it creates a nice plot dynamic. Astryx doesn't have to be the terrible mercenary out to get a bounty on a loveable side character--it can be comic relief where Zyll escapes her bonds but then comes along anyway. It removes some seriousness, and makes it more about the relationships between the characters. And, Zyll at least gets some explanation in the end for her behavior, so it's not entirely fluff either.

(I think also you might want to have read Goblins & Greatcoats to get an introduction to Zyll and the titular breadknife. It's not that important, but it also makes that appearance of the titular breadknife even more random without that morsel of backstory.)

If I had any negatives, it's that I still squint so hard at the economics of this world. The threat in this story is that friends will be disappointed in you. There is very little worry around the fact that you (and your friends) have invested huge amounts of money in opening a bookstore business in a new town. In some ways, I feel like the small business capitalism aspect of these books undermines the cozy flavor that it's going for. I think there's just a dissonance to me where concerns about money are brushed under the rug and there's an assumption that everybody and everything will be fine without any worldbuilding or explanation for why that is.