User Profile

enne📚

picklish@books.theunseen.city

Joined 2 years, 3 months ago

I read largely sff, some romance and mystery, very little non-fiction. I'm trying to write at least a little review of everything I'm reading, but it's a little bit of an experiment in progress.

I'm @picklish@weirder.earth elsewhere.

This link opens in a pop-up window

A. D. Sui: The Dragonfly Gambit (Paperback, 2024, Neon Hemlock Press) 5 stars

Nearly ten years after Inez Kato sustained a career-ending injury during a military exercise gone …

Before I know it, one of the forks is in my hand and I strike, on instinct alone. In one smooth motion, The Third Daughter catches my wrist and twists it just ever slightly. My fingers unfurl and the utensil falls silently against the lush, burgundy carpet.

"Now, that's a dessert fork, Ms Kato," Rezál says, her eyes alight with a playful twinkle. "You won't do any real damage with a dessert fork."

— The Dragonfly Gambit by  (19%)

A. D. Sui: The Dragonfly Gambit (Paperback, 2024, Neon Hemlock Press) 5 stars

Nearly ten years after Inez Kato sustained a career-ending injury during a military exercise gone …

The Dragonfly Gambit

5 stars

A delightful gay science fiction novella about a carefully planned revenge against an empire. I read this because it's a nominee for the Nebula best novella this year.

Enemies to lovers tropes aren't always my thing, but it works for me here. Both sides personally have reasons to be attracted to the other, but aren't betraying their values because they each feel like they're using the other to their own ends. Moreover, this dynamic feeds into the larger double-crosses and secret-keeping going on.

This book went from good to great right at the stinger at the end of chapter seven, when the layers of deception start to peel back. I won't spoil the line directly, but chef's kiss.

avatar for picklish enne📚 boosted
Izzy Wasserstein: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart (EBook, 2024, Tachyon Publications) 4 stars

Security expert Dora left her anarchist commune over safety concerns. But when her ex-girlfriend Kay …

Short and bitter

5 stars

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart is a vignette about working through guilt and self-loathing toward self-forgiveness.

There's a lot going on in terms of themes: gender, transhumanism, anarchy and fascism, cloning, all mixed into a more standard crime plot.

Although the main thread is satisfactorily wrapped up, there's definitely room to explore the world further - I want more Dora!

#SFFBookClub

avatar for picklish enne📚 boosted

reviewed Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao (Iron Widow, #1)

Xiran Jay Zhao: Iron Widow (2021, Penguin Teen) 4 stars

Science fiction and East Asian myth combine in this dazzling retelling of the rise of …

Iron Widow

4 stars

I gave this book a reread before getting to the sequel because it had been a bit.

I forgot how this book starts off with such a YA anime-esque tone. There's something about celebrity mecha pilots and media companies that rings a lot of hunger games-esque bells. But the world itself is almost too overly defined, where pilots have an objective "spirit pressure" for their piloting strength and there's both a mecha and enemy taxonomy that feel like something that could go into a wikipedia entry. In the end, these largely (thankfully) fall away and are more hook than truth.

One thing that's interesting to me is that Wu Zetian is a messy character who does unlikeable things at times. The plot is fundamentally a revenge plot that escalates, and she's willing to get her hands dirty to do what she feels is right.

The book ends on a bit …

quoted Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao (Iron Widow, #1)

Xiran Jay Zhao: Iron Widow (2021, Penguin Teen) 4 stars

Science fiction and East Asian myth combine in this dazzling retelling of the rise of …

There's no way to keep my dignity except to act like he is not capable of taking mine away, no matter what he does to me.

And, in the end, isn't that all dignity is? The boundaries and values you decide for yourself? I know what matters most to me, and it has nothing to do with any semblance of "purity." I will not make myself small and crumple into a sad creature of fear that lives to please Li Shimin in hopes of earning his mercy.

— Iron Widow by  (Iron Widow, #1) (32%)

Izzy Wasserstein: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart (EBook, 2024, Tachyon Publications) 4 stars

Security expert Dora left her anarchist commune over safety concerns. But when her ex-girlfriend Kay …

Only time I had a lawyer, a blond guy with an expensive suit, a Texas accent. He wanted to enter my implant's stored memories into evidence, since the cops' augments had experienced 'interference.' A test case, he said. Poor guy really believed the system, could be fixed. Offered his services pro bono if I gave them access to my memories, my traumas. Shit, no.

So I did the time, kept my memories private. There's stuff in my head that only I will ever know. The point isn't what I suffered.

It's that some of us survive. Somehow, even now.

— These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by  (Page 89)

Izzy Wasserstein: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart (EBook, 2024, Tachyon Publications) 4 stars

Security expert Dora left her anarchist commune over safety concerns. But when her ex-girlfriend Kay …

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart

4 stars

These Fragile Graces is a fun trans noir murder mystery novella. It's a story that focuses much more on interpersonal and community relations than it does on a well-plotted mystery or detailed worldbuilding. That focus also sums up my feelings about what I felt worked and didn't in the story.

Mostly, I wish the mystery plot was a little bit more cohesive, and that there was more detail about the state of the world itself rather than being in a vague near-future urban decay. I loved the small detail of having memory implants to deal with trauma-based dissociation from childhood, but I wish the ideas around implants/augments and a rejection syndrome connected more to the plot.

It is nice to see an anarchist commune in fiction (I feel like maybe I've only read this in Margaret Killjoy's work previously) and how the protagonist Dora wrestles with her relationship with the …

Janice Hallett: The Examiner (Hardcover, 2024, Atria Books) 1 star

Told in emails, text messages, and essays, this unputdownable mystery follows a group of students …

The Examiner

1 star

I love a mystery! I love an epistolary novel! However, The Examiner just did not work for me. This is largely going to be a negative review, so feel free to skip. If I wanted to pitch this book positively, I would say that it is a mystery novel about an art master's program told through the artifacts of its forum posts, class assignments, and group chats. An external examiner has been called in to make an accounting of the program, and becomes increasingly concerned that somebody may have died during the course of the class.

This is my first Janice Hallett book, and most of the way I bounced off of it is that the writing doesn't feel like text chat. Everybody capitalizes sentences and ends with full stops. There's very few sentence fragments. Characters have a largely similar writing style, even when they range from ages 20 to …

quoted Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)

Micaiah Johnson: Those Beyond the Wall 4 stars

Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …

If Wiley City cares about nature, they must only care about the right kind. They must only care if the nature is pretty, or serves them. They must only care if the nature makes them feel good about themselves, or if caring makes them look good to others.

— Those Beyond the Wall by  (The Space Between Worlds, #2) (18%)

reviewed Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)

Micaiah Johnson: Those Beyond the Wall 4 stars

Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …

Those Beyond the Wall

4 stars

This was the #SFFBookClub book for February 2025. I am honestly a little surprised that it got a sequel. While I enjoyed it, I think this book suffers a little from being in the shadow of such a strong first book. It brings back nearly every character, although rooted in one world rather than worldhopping, and as such you really need to have read the first book to enjoy this one. The pitch for this book read almost as a murder investigation, but with foreknowledge from book one, it seemed incredibly obvious what the cause could be. This could just be a case of incorrect expectations on my part that the book would have more of a mystery element.

Thematically, I'm here for this story about justice and tearing down borders that separate the hoarding and exploitative rich from the poor. Here for the anger about how these rich people …

Linda Codega: Motheater (Hardcover, 2025, Erewhon Books) 3 stars

In a startling and nuanced queer fantasy set amid the beauty of an Appalachian mountain, …

She was desperate enough to go after dead bodies in Appalachian rivers to prove what she knew: White Rock was letting their miners die in the dark.

Instead she had a real, live, breathing lady in the bed of her truck, dirt all on her boots, and none of the mining company.

— Motheater by  (Page 3)

Linda Codega: Motheater (Hardcover, 2025, Erewhon Books) 3 stars

In a startling and nuanced queer fantasy set amid the beauty of an Appalachian mountain, …

Motheater

3 stars

I wanted to like this queer witchy Appalachian book a lot more than I ended up enjoying it. The setup is that Benethea Mattox has sacrificed everything to find out why her friend mysteriously died in a mining accident; she rescues a mysterious woman from a river, who turns out to be a hundred plus year old witch with her own vendetta.

The perspective of the book alternates between Bennie in the present and Motheater in the past. What doesn't work for me is that most of the interesting tension happens in the past; Bennie's own agency and mystery solving in the present is largely subsumed in service to helping Motheater with her own plot.

One interesting observation is that I read the conflict as being between protecting the people vs protecting the land. Motheater wants to provide for her people but is competing with the growing needs and desires …