The Poet Empress by Shen Tao
Sending up the Bat Signal on this book, my first use of it this year. (FYI the last time I used it was with The Raven Scholar, my best book of 2025, so you know it’s serious.) I wouldn’t recommend this book as widely or as often as I have The Raven Scholar, but for a certain type of reader, this thing will hit hard. (As it hit me. Last night, crying softly on my couch as I opined to myself, IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL.) First […]
Nine Goblins by T. Kingfisher
“All you had were pigs and enthusiasm. It’s not your fault.” The first book Ursula Vernon wrote under the penname T. Kingfisher; she self-published it because trad publishing did not want to subject children to things they felt were “inappropriate.” Meanwhile, she’s over here in her introduction to the new, adorable trad-published version of this book, saying things like, kids would appreciate a dead body or two. And I agree with her! Anyway, this book is in the tradition of Pratchett, with T. Kingfisher proclivities […]
Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson
Honestly, this is a good book, and I knew when I bought it that things might turn out this way, but I wanted to give it a shot. This is a vampire story, and above all, a story of revenge. I enjoy a good revenge story now and then, but this is the type I do not care for: one that takes its characters to places they cannot come back from. Also, depressing. Specifically: SPOILERS their journey of vengeances leads our two main characters, an […]
The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vols. 1-3 by Beth Brower
This is a wild thing to say, but I’m saying it, so stay with me. This series is Dungeon Crawler Carl for the Jane Austenites. I’m not even finished with it yet and I already know that. It’s the kind of story you read once, probably in a very short time, then immediately go back in for a re-read or five. This story is—aside from having lovable characters and a certain anti-authoritarian bent—nothing like Dungeon Crawler Carl. And yet. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. […]
An Evil Premise by T. Marie Vandelly
This book tried to make Fetch happen. Fetch did not happen. January is a new record for my first one star book of the year. I made it to the end of October last year before I uno-dubbed my first book. I can’t believe I actually finished the book, but the premise (what drew me to it in the first place) was too intriguing, so I had to know how it ended. Honestly, what I found was worse than mid-book-me could have imagined. This book […]
The Names by Florence Knapp
To sum up, this was not for me! Move along if that’s enough for you. I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about this book and why it didn’t work for me, but after the great first several chapters, I quickly found myself souring on it. The Names is literary fiction with a speculative twist: a woman named Cora has been tasked with registering her newborn son’s name, and the book splits off into parallel narratives with different stories created by her three different choices of […]
