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This is a young, trans fantasy story that begins with teenager Lorel switching places with her friend Lane to go join a coven of witches, trying to keep them from discovering that she's not a girl. It's not billed as YA, but I would give it that label--although there's a good bit of physical violence on the page, this is a coming-of-age story with a large focus on peer relationships inside a larger adult structure.

Unsurprisingly for a Margaret Killjoy book, this is a very trans story. Lorel spends the majority of her mental energy worrying about being found out, and even after her secret is partially revealed, there's still terfy antagonism and fears of acceptance. In a world with magic, I also quite appreciated the trans nuance of "do I want to change my body because other people would accept me more or because I want to change it for myself (and maybe I don't)".

There's a lot of neat smaller worldbuilding details here that I really enjoyed. Magic in this world is grasped through metaphor, and depending on the metaphor used there are different perspectives and tradeoffs. I like that the fantasy political landscape is a bit of chaotic feudalism, full of different groups of knights with different loyalties and values, rather than clear cut countries with rulers.

My real disappointment with this book is that I wish the characters had more depth. The protagonist Lorel doesn't really get much time in her home town before joining the witches, and we only get scraps about who she is or where she came from. The reader hears more about Araneigh's family than they do about Lorel's. It's also hard to know much about Lorel's self that isn't explicitly a response to being trans; she doesn't talk about herself much (because she's hiding her past), she volunteers for cooking (so as not to reinforce gender roles), and she works incredibly hard (and so that people look kindly on her if her secret ever came out). The dynamics between Hex and Lorel are the most interesting character bits, and there's a moment of tension about Araneigh's feelings around Lorel's body, but on the whole most characters feel fairly one note.

This is book one of a trilogy, so there's certainly room for the future. It also didn't end with a lot of hooks for the sequel, so I'm quite curious where it will go.

This book is the October/November #SFFBookClub book. It's a collection of stories about an empire that has fallen and been rebuilt multiple times, each focusing on a very different place and time, and each told with a narrated fable-like style. One stylistic choice that stands out immediately is that the sentence structure is quite long and there are often comically long lists of names or places or ideas or things or professions or or or... I found this to be overall a delight, personally.

This may be due to expectations that I had going into this, but the stories in this novel felt loose and disconnected. This is especially due to coming off collections of short stories like How High We Go in the Dark or even North Continent Ribbon, which interconnect the stories together with shared characters or worldbuilding. Kalpa Imperial had very few touchpoints between stories other than a loose thematic sense, and this created a storytale atmosphere where places and characters and words washed over me, unlistened.

Nothing was rooted in a time. Most stories were barely rooted in a place, and at best were set against "the south". Characters are referenced and never touched on again (or at best mentioned in passing elsewhere once). The storyteller narration references historical context that the in-universe listener would know to situate this story in, but to me the reader it felt like noise rather than worldbuilding, akin to opening the Silmarillion to a random page with no further context.

Theoretically, I can imagine placing any book on some hypothetical scale of narrative detail. (As a joke, let's say this is a scale with one end being the TV series Lost and the other end being a Brandon Sanderson wiki). I don't need all the details in a world spelled out, but there's a tipping point where there's enough detail where I believe that the author could fill in the blanks if needed. Well before that tipping point, it feels like authors are largely making everything up whimsically as they go. I think you can tell a set of disconnected stories where all the details are constructed out of whole cloth, but there needs to be some strong thematic through line to carry it, at least for me. This novel just doesn't quite have that.

To come back and treat this book for what it is rather than what I expected it to be, thematically I would try to pin this book down as about being about telling stories and taking the long view of history--that all places and empires and people change dramatically over time and can become something different. I think secondarily, it feels like it's a set of critiques and observations about empires and humanity; it's full of wry critiques of power, of nobles, and of human nature. I found the book amazingly quotable and quite funny in parts.

This is a hard book to recommend; even as I enjoyed it, its lack of coherence and whimsical storytale nature make it more a book that I enjoyed in passing than one that will stick with me.

This fantasy novel has a fun blend of politics, murder mystery, and rivals-to-lovers romance.

Lorelei Kaskel is picked to lead a small expedition to find the Urspring, source of all magical power, for King Wilhelm to unify his fragile empire. On her team is her infuriating academic rival Sylvia von Wolff. Once on the boat, Lorelei's mentor is murdered, and Lorelei has to work with Sylvia to continue to the expedition and find the murderer.

The dynamics of enemies-to-lovers don't always work for me, but somehow this one was a lot of fun! I felt like there was a lot of nuance around class and power dynamics, around misunderstandings, and around the tension of Lorelei not wanting to abandon her culture any more than she already had. This romance was as bumpy of a ride as you'd expect, but that bumpiness didn't feel artificial--it revealed characterization or heightens the mystery and politics. The ending of the book felt a little anticlimactic, but even so I found it satisfying in the way that it realistically addressed the needs of all the characters.

As an aside, this is an incredibly minor and personal pet peeve, but I do wish The Old Goat and the Alien had fewer explicit identity labels in it and that, well, that the aliens were more alien? (What do human genders or autism mean to aliens anyway? I'd like to know! This would be a very different book, so this is all less of a critique and more noticing how my brain is derailed by these questions.)

On the positive side, this book has an in-universe translator and so there's room to play with cultural differences. Avari can be "verian"--approximately but also not quite autistic. Jenna says that she is trans; Avari can reflect that they too are not the same gender they grew up with, but also that the connotations are different. Mostly, I wish there was even more cosmoran social worldbuilding for what this meant on Avari's end or what cosmoran gender even means.

Explicit identity labels to me often feel like telling instead of showing, and I worry a little about how dated a book will feel when the language merry-go-round settles on a different word five and then ten years from now. Also, it's not as if "being aromantic" or "being trans" or "being asexual" are precise terms; there's always a personal meaning and a partial-at-best mapping to these messy buckets. I'd rather have a character-building moment to subjectively describe these experiences and how it's affected them rather than to pull out an identity label as a shorthand, especially in a fictional universe.

The Old Goat and the Alien is a cozy, fluffy scifi novel that is largely inwardly focused on character growth and interpersonal conflict. It's also hella queer. This book is exactly the soft hug I expected it to be.

The main plot hook is that grumpy, goat-shape Avari inadvertantly becomes the host for the newly arrived "alien" (human) Jenna who shows up through a portal with no resources and no friends. This book has a confetti grab-bag of genders and trans and queer and disability flavors. I love love the gift economy. I also super appreciate the detail of having a major side character be a plural system that is chimera-shaped.

A story with this many identities also creates so much space for nuance; there's different kinds of disability accommodations, there's two very different ways of being autistic, there's many different ways of being trans.

(also Tak! shoutout in the thanks section??)

This anthology of transfeminine cyberpunk stories had some gems in it. The pitch made me hope for transformative ways of being intersected with surviving under oppressive social structures (it's always capitalism), and it very much delivered. It's rare that every story in a collection lands for me as a reader, but it seems a positive trait that they all didn't in this one trying to go in weirder and stranger directions.

There are so many good quotes I want to share from this collection but I'll try to limit myself.

A taste of my favorite stories: * a woman who drives a giant robot cube on the moon for scientists as a second job and dreams of moving there to have less lag in her embodiment * a bespoke body-creating artist (with their own nuanced dysphoria) trying to create body euphoria for others in a world where their bodies are callously sold at auction * an underground group who syncs their memories with each other working to collectively survive (and fight) puritanical fascists * a scientist who injects herself with own soon-to-be-shutdown nanite project and tries to figure out how to be a mother to them