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I quite enjoyed Rules for Ghosting. I cry a lot but I don't normally cry at books--however, this one got me, several times. This is a romance/drama sort of book, if genre is important to you. Despite being about ghosts, they're honestly quite cozy and this isn't a horror book.

The protagonist of this book is Ezra, a Jewish trans man who has left his family's funeral business because he can see ghosts. Quickly on, Ezra develops a thing for his new housemate Jonathan, but unfortunately the ghost of Jonathan's dead husband starts speaking to him.

What's funny to me about this book is that the supernatural elements are not the most plot critical. This book is bursting (almost to its detriment) with family drama and trauma and relationship issues and other plot points. Ezra eventually does come out to his siblings about his psychic nature, and their reaction is (affectionately and realistically) along the lines of "ok thanks for sharing, but let's get back to all the bigger problems".

Rather than taking over the story, the supernatural elements are there like a little sprinkling of ghost drama to exacerbate Ezra's preexisting problem-solving tendencies and give him another secret that he has to come out about. (And, it's thankfully a story with multiple trans people in it that's not about coming about as trans. Just about being psychic.)

It's sweet. It's messy. It's queer. It's a warm hug of community and family. I loved it.

This is my first Natasha Pulley book. I'd describe this one as a scifi romance with some wry comedic tones[1].

If there's a scale of hard scifi, this book is more grounded than Malka Older's Pleiti and Mossa books, but overall the science is very handwavy. The emphasis in this story is on the relationships and the politics (both interplanetary and local); it's set in a partially terraformed Mars (breathable but unliveably cold and dusty) whereas Earth is burning and sinking and many refugees are emigrating to Mars.

The big political issue of the day on Mars is the naturalization of Earthstrong people. Due to gravity differences, folks coming from earth are three times stronger than folks born on Mars and are thus extremely dangerous and must wear a titanium "cage" at all times that renders them much weaker. There is a process to "naturalize" to Mars gravity (whatever that means), but it often leaves people with massive health issues and nerve damage.

Romance-wise, this is an arranged marriage between two people who hate each other. (At some point maybe I should stop saying I don't like this trope generally? I swear I'm not seeking it out, but also I do keep finding it.) January used to be the principal at the Royal Ballet in London but shortly moves to Mars and is doing physical labor. Aubrey Gale is a non-binary (my word) politician whose forced Earthstrong naturalization politics directly conflict with January's needs, and whose previous consort has mysteriously disappeared under suspicious circumstances.

(Perhaps one of my biggest complaints about the novel is that January too quickly gloms onto Aubrey. Sure, there's economic reasons for this. Sure, there's some personal reasons for why he would do this. I think the book deals ~ok with January's fear that the previous consort could have been murdered by Aubrey, but not very well with the political difference? This feels very huge to me. Aubrey is described as a fascist early on, even if this isn't quite true! I needed more acknowledgement of how January feels about the politics, because it feels swept under the rug and was a huge part of the initial setup prior to the marriage.)

The book does have a lot of fun little details. Linguistics nerdery! Mammoths?! Class differences! Internet dependency because it's directly in people's brains! Gender abolition (but only sort of, cf Terra Ignota)! Discussions of power differences across force, gender, and money!

Overall, I think it was fluffier, funnier, and grippier than I expected it to be. I'm not sure I was sold on the core relationship and I think that took it down a few notches for me.

[1] I was not prepared for sarcastic footnotes!

@otterlove@bookwyrm.social she's still writing them too!?!?!

I expected more sci-fi elements going into this book. They did appear, but have ended up somewhat overshadowed by everything else.

The blurb describes the book as "Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet", but the story brings in a bunch more. It's a story about being trans, about immigrants, about art, about legacy, about making authentic doughnuts.

I feel 3 things about this book:

1. It's rooted in truth. It's that quality of a book to gut punch you, because you care about its characters, because they reflect a truth about the world.

2. It's cute. This is where it feels closest to the Wayfarers series. It has kindness, and takes time to be silly.

3. It's decidedly down to Earth. This is the part that has taken me aback. I expected more "space stuff", but got surprisingly vivid depiction of California instead.

This book throws a bunch of ideas at you. Many of them could have filled entire novels of their own. Here they end up under-explored. But the throughline is strong enough to tie it all together.

@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.