Crowbones, by Anne Bishop

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Author’s website | Publisher’s website
Publication date – March 8, 2022

Summary: Crowbones will gitcha if you don’t watch out!

Deep in the territory controlled by the Others—shape-shifters, vampires, and even deadlier paranormal beings—Vicki DeVine has made a new life for herself running The Jumble, a rustic resort. When she decides to host a gathering of friends and guests for Trickster Night, at first everything is going well between the humans and the Others.

But then someone arrives dressed as Crowbones, the Crowgard bogeyman. When the impostor is killed along with a shape-shifting Crow, and the deaths are clearly connected, everyone fears that the real Crowbones may have come to The Jumble—and that could mean serious trouble.

To “encourage” humans to help them find some answers, the Elders and Elementals close all the roads, locking in suspects and victims alike. Now Vicki, human police chief Grimshaw, vampire lawyer Ilya Sanguinati, and the rest of their friends have to figure out who is manipulating events designed to pit humans against Others—and who may have put Vicki DeVine in the crosshairs of a powerful hunter.

Thoughts: Starting very shortly after the end of Lake Silence, and with the same cast of characters, Crowbones starts out with Vicki DeVine getting her terra indigene friends interested in the tradition of Trickster Night, this world’s equivalent of Halloween. Seems like a fun harmless thing, a nice way to get the Others to understand human traditions and interact with them a little bit, especially with some new human guests staying at Vicki’s property on Lake Silence.

But it wouldn’t be an Others novel if this plan didn’t go terribly awry. The arrival of a figure dressed as the terrifying Crowbones, an Elder terra indigene who dispenses brutal justice to and on behalf of the Crowgard, arrives at the Jumble and scares the everloving crap out of everyone. Turns out that first sighting was someone dressed up as Crowbones, not the real thing, but that begs the question: how did a human know what Crowbones looks like?

And why does the real Crowbones arrive shortly after? Why are both humans and Crows being killed? How does it all connect to the humans staying at the Jumble? Or does it connect to the arrival of 4 young Sanguinati vampires who recently arrived at Lake Silence to learn how to interact with humans?

Crowbones is, at its heart, a murder mystery, which seems to be par for the course for things involving Vicki, since Lake Silence was also a murder mystery. Death seems to happen around her a distressing amount. But this time the stakes are higher, as the arrival of the actual Crowbones means that some sort of corruption has come to the town of Sproing and its surrounding area, and the Elementals respond by literally blocking off all the roads so that nobody can leave or enter until the mystery, and the corruption, have been dealt with. It was honestly interesting to see so many small mysteries and plot threads all stemmed from the same source. All the questions I asked in the previous paragraph? They are all connected, even if it doesn’t seem like it at first.

And honestly, I think the reason I find this interesting is because it didn’t need to happen. I’ve said before that sometimes books are notable for what they don’t do rather than what they do do, and I think this is one of those cases. The young Sanguinati could have just been there because they were there, and to add a little tension by involving inexperienced teen-equivalents into an ongoing murder investigation… but that wasn’t the case. The professors visiting the Jumble in order to get a chance to meet some terra indigene and learn more about their folklore and mythology could have been an element solely there to explain the human perspective on what Crowbones might be, or to provide some amusing misunderstandings… but there was so much more to it than that. I’m no mystery writer, and I don’t have the greatest amount of experience in holding that many mysterious plot threads as I write, but it seems to me that a number of mysteries do have those little side-elements, things that add depth to the story and the world but aren’t necessarily directly related to the mystery at hand.

And that didn’t happen here.

And so I was hooked the whole way through, trying to piece together all the clues and figure out what fit and how it fit and maybe what was a red herring… It was a fun read, in that regard.

My biggest complaint is, weirdly, the character of Crowbones itself. Crowbones is an Elder terra indigene, known as the world’s “teeth and claws,” and Crowbones is a sort of bogeyman for the Crowgard. Its purpose (I’m deliberately obscuring Crowbones’s gender here, to avoid potential spoilers) is to kill bad Crows who have become a threat to their kind or who have become corrupted, and to avenge Crows who have lost their lives to that same sort of corruption. A very cool concept, something that will avenge you if you fall, but will punish the hell out of you if you transgress. Makes sense.

So… where was Crowbones when Crows were literally being targeted and killed in Murder of Crows? Crowbones is only one person, sure, and can’t be everywhere at once, but in that novel twisted humans were deliberately targeting Crows by luring them in with shiny things and then poisoning them or setting vicious drugged animals on them… and there was no rattle rattle rattle of Crowbones drawing near to seek revenge.

Or maybe that did happen, but it all happened off the page. Maybe Crowbones didn’t get there before other people handled the situation. I don’t know. But it was a plot hole that I noticed. Really, not an uncommon plot hole when one is dealing with a book series that’s approaching 10 novels at this point. Sooner or later, you’re bound to have an idea for a new story, and there’s an element or two that gets introduced that probably should have been mentioned in an earlier book, but you couldn’t do that because you didn’t think of it until now. It happens. I get that. But it’s still worth mentioning. When readers have to read between the lines and come up with their own theories as to why this didn’t happen sooner, it feels like an oversight, even when it’s just… chronology.

Anyway, on the whole, I really enjoyed Crowbones, and the expansion of lore that it provided for the series. I still relate a lot to Vicki, so I think I’ll forever enjoy reading the novels that involve her, and I’m definitely here for more of them if Anne Bishop decides to write them. (There were some hints at the end of the book that there’s something odd happening to the Sanguinati, so I suspect there’ll be at least one more spin-off novel in the future, and I’m absolutely here for it!) Bishop continues being able to tell a compelling story in an interesting world, and this series long ago became a comfort read for me, so I admit I’m a little biased, but still. If you enjoy the Others novels, then you’re also likely to enjoy Crowbones too, especially if you were a fan of Lake Silence. This isn’t really one you can read without having read Lake Silence already, so it’s not a good jumping-in point for the series, but if you’re already a fan, yeah, you’ll appreciate this one too.

And if you don’t… Well, Crowbones is gonna gitcha.

(Book received in exchange for an honest review.)

The Witness for the Dead, by Katherine Addison

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Author’s website | Publisher’s website
Publication date – June 22, 2021

Summary: When the young half-goblin emperor Maia sought to learn who had set the bombs that killed his father and half-brothers, he turned to an obscure resident of his father’s Court, a Prelate of Ulis and a Witness for the Dead. Thara Celehar found the truth, though it did him no good to discover it. He lost his place as a retainer of his cousin the former Empress, and made far too many enemies among the many factions vying for power in the new Court. The favor of the Emperor is a dangerous coin.

Now Celehar lives in the city of Amalo, far from the Court though not exactly in exile. He has not escaped from politics, but his position gives him the ability to serve the common people of the city, which is his preference. He lives modestly, but his decency and fundamental honesty will not permit him to live quietly. As a Witness for the Dead, he can, sometimes, speak to the recently dead: see the last thing they saw, know the last thought they had, experience the last thing they felt. It is his duty use that ability to resolve disputes, to ascertain the intent of the dead, to find the killers of the murdered.

Celehar’s skills now lead him out of the quiet and into a morass of treachery, murder, and injustice. No matter his own background with the imperial house, Celehar will stand with the commoners, and possibly find a light in the darkness.

Thoughts: Side-story to The Goblin Emperor, The Witness for the Dead centres around one of the previous novel’s secondary characters: Thara Celehar, a prelate of Ulis and Witness for the Dead, meaning he can experience the last moments of a person’s death if he touches their body. Celehar would rather be out of the spotlight than in it, which is why he makes for such an interesting protagonist in this short companion novel to The Goblin Emperor. Don’t get me wrong, protagonists who throw themselves headlong into adventure are fun and all, but it’s always interesting to me when a book centres on someone who would rather just be left alone.

Life, however, doesn’t want to leave Celehar alone. Poor bastard.

Taking place shortly after The Goblin Emperor, Celehar now lives in Amalo, still following his calling. This involves a variety of duties, including investigating murder. So when Arveneӓn Shelsin, an ambitious opera singer, is found dead, and Celehar confirms that she was indeed murdered, the race is on to not only find the murderer, but to uncover why they killed in the first place.

Celehar’s reluctance to engage with a lot of the world is, as I mentioned, an interesting move. It’s not something that could work for everyone, but Addison manages a good balance between showing Celehar’s introversion and actually putting him in positions where he can do some good in the world. Celehar is very relatable for me in that way. Except that I don’t have any abilities or callings that would make the world a better place, the way he does. It’s admirable, though, that even though Celehar would rather be left to his own devices, he doesn’t shirk the responsibilities that come with his calling. He might not be happy about things, but he’ll do what he feels drawn to do. More characters like this, please!

Addison’s detail-oriented writing style makes for an excellent murder mystery, that’s for damn sure. While The Goblin Emperor did have some mystery to it, at its heart it was about Maia settling into his new and unexpected role and the emperor, and all that entailed. The Witness for the Dead shifts the tone and setting away from political intrigue and a fish-out-of-water/coming-of-age story, and into a situation where a man must solve a murder in order to lay the victim’s spirit to rest and give them a proper funeral. Such a simple thing in theory, but it becomes so much more complicated when Celehar must risk offending some very powerful people, and sort through layers of potential motivation for the kill, in his mission to bring about justice for Arveneӓn.

Honestly, I think Addison has a knack for writing a good solid mystery, and I’m here for it. Her world-building is brilliant, rich and realistic, and it’s a wonderful setting for any number of mysteries. I’ve found in recent years that I have a bit of a soft spot for fantasy mysteries, so it’s no real surprise that I enjoyed The Witness for the Dead as much as I did. If you have similar weakness for fantasy mysteries, or you just enjoyed The Goblin Emperor, then I highly recommend giving this novella a go. It’s not very long, but it packs a punch, and is a wonderful companion and spin-off to the main book. Celehar is a character I absolutely love reading about, and will be quiet happy to do so more in the future.

(Book received in exchange for an honest review.)

Lake Silence, by Anne Bishop

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Author’s website | Publisher’s website
Publication date – March 6, 2018

Summary: Human laws do not apply in the territory controlled by the Others–vampires, shape-shifters, and even deadlier paranormal beings. And this is a fact that humans should never, ever forget…

After her divorce, Vicki DeVine took over a rustic resort near Lake Silence, in a human town that is not human controlled. Towns such as Vicki’s don’t have any distance from the Others, the dominant predators who rule most of the land and all of the water throughout the world. And when a place has no boundaries, you never really know what is out there watching you.

Vicki was hoping to find a new career and a new life. But when her lodger, Aggie Crowe–one of the shape-shifting Others–discovers a murdered man, Vicki finds trouble instead. The detectives want to pin the death on her, despite the evidence that nothing human could have killed the victim. As Vicki and her friends search for answers, ancient forces are roused by the disturbance in their domain. They have rules that must not be broken–and all the destructive powers of nature at their command.

Thoughts: It’s no surprise that I really enjoy Anne Bishop’s novels. I mean, for crying out loud, I was over the freaking moon when I got lucky enough to interview her last year! (Highlight of my blogging career!) And while the Others books do have some problematic implications at times, I still enjoy the absolute heck out of them, and the series is basically a comfort re-read at this point. So even when Lake Silence first released, I was primed to enjoy it.

But I didn’t expect to relate to the protagonist quite as much as I did.

So, the story centres around Vicki DeVine, which is a pretty cheesy name from the mind of an author who is somewhat known for cheesy names. Still. Vicki is recently divorced, and part of her divorce settlement from her abusive ex-husband is what he thought to be completely worthless property that had been in his family for a while. He passed that off to Vicki to avoid having to give her anything he thought of as valuable. The property comes with a pretty restrictive contract, however, which Vicki takes very seriously, and she works to start restoring the property as best she can.

Turns out that the reason for the strict contract is because the area is meant as a sort of testing ground for the local terra indigene, the shapeshifters and vampires who rule the vast majority of the world. In this safe space that’s right on the edge of the dangerous wild country, they can interact with humans and adjust to their presence, and the two groups can learn to cooperate as best they can. So when Vicki’s ex wants the land back to turn it into a luxury resort, naturally things get… tense.

And full of death. The Others don’t tolerate their rules being broken.

None of that description explained why I related to Vicki quite so hard, I admit, but the way her character develops through the story… First off, Vicki is literally how I used to spell my legal name for a while, and honestly, it still throws me off a little when I find characters that share my name. It’s like seeing a piece of myself on the page, even if that character is nothing like me. But Vicki is an awful lot like me. She’s prone to panic attacks after years of abuse, and while my abuse didn’t come from an ex-spouse, I still know what it’s like to have my anxiety triggered by any man who appears even a little bit threatening. Vicki is also a bit on the large side, and I can relate to that as well, along with having that be a bit of a sore spot after a lifetime of people making fun of my weight and treating me like I’m worth less because I weigh more.

Also she has a bit of a soft spot for one of the local vampires. So, uh, yes, very relatable!

Vicki’s journey to self-reliance is one that I honestly loved, and reinforced that yeah, I could probably get along with the terra indigene if I existed in that world. By simply being willing to try and follow through on the responsibilities she was handed when her ex-husband fobbed off that property on her, she marks herself as someone who’s willing to worth with the Others rather than taking the typical arrogant human approach of being antagonistic toward them. Seriously, in these books, the biggest cause of friction is humans deciding they shouldn’t have to play by the rules. And not because humans are so downtrodden and abused (though admittedly, risking death as a consequence for transgressions isn’t exactly a fun prospect), but there are a number of antagonists in the Others books who think that humans should be dominant and so attempt to commit genocide against the terra indigene. They’re not seeking coexistence, they’re not trying to be reasonable, they just want power.

And frankly, there’s enough of that in the real world, so it’s not hard to see where Bishop got her inspiration. There are a lot of people out there who are terrified of not being on top, and so take action to ensure that those their consider a threat to that power are subjugated.

So the fact that Vicki is willing to do what she can to cooperate with the terra indigene does actually set her apart, as even those who aren’t necessarily antagonistic still prefer to keep away from anything to do with the Others. Willingness to work together means a lot, and that’s how Vicki ends up with a strong support system to help her deal with the problems in her life. Whether those problems involve not being able to lift heavy things on the property, or whether they involve standing up to the people who seek to abuse her, she has people who are in her corner. I love that. I love reading about somebody I relate to ending up with wonderful companions and the ability to move forward in their life. Gives me hope for myself, you know?

If you’re a fan of the main 5 books of the Others series, then chances are high you’ll enjoy Lake Silence too. It’s a spin-off from the main series in that it doesn’t involve Meg or Simon, and in that it shows us a glimpse into other aspects of this urban fantasy world, other people who also have stories worth telling. Even if you don’t have the same personal connection to Vicki that I do, I still think there’s plenty to appreciate in her story, and the unlikely support structure a person can end up with if they’re willing to rise to a challenge and do the right thing.

(You’d think that doing the right thing would be the easy choice when doing the wrong thing might get you eaten, but, well…)

Fireheart Tiger, by Aliette de Bodard

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Author’s website | Publisher’s website
Publication date – February 9, 2021

Summary: Fire burns bright and has a long memory….

Quiet, thoughtful princess Thanh was sent away as a hostage to the powerful faraway country of Ephteria as a child. Now she’s returned to her mother’s imperial court, haunted not only by memories of her first romance, but by worrying magical echoes of a fire that devastated Ephteria’s royal palace.

Thanh’s new role as a diplomat places her once again in the path of her first love, the powerful and magnetic Eldris of Ephteria, who knows exactly what she wants: romance from Thanh and much more from Thanh’s home. Eldris won’t take no for an answer, on either front. But the fire that burned down one palace is tempting Thanh with the possibility of making her own dangerous decisions.

Can Thanh find the freedom to shape her country’s fate–and her own?

Review: I love de Bodard’s writing a lot. It feels very… I know this may sound weird, but very elemental. In my mind, her writing feels like the heat of fire and the depths of the ocean, something that is very much its own thing. Nothing else is really like it. I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone but me… The joy of trying to explain books when you’re neurodivergent and experience a lot of things through emotion and sensation, I guess!

Anyway, Fireheart Tiger is the story of Thanh, Imperial princess who finds herself caught between desire and duty, obligation and the self, and figuring out whether old flames are worth hanging onto or letting go.

Double meaning very much intended.

There’s a lot of evocative world-building in such a short novella. De Bodard has never really coddled readers when it comes to picking up cultural nuances in her writing, and I really like that. Some of the worldbuilding is absolutely secondary-world fantasy, but it gets a lot of inspiration from Vietnamese culture and mythology. I have a soft spot for fantasy with non-Western influence, frankly.

Thanh’s emotional abuse comes through so strongly in this. She’s under so much pressure from people she should, by all rights, be able to turn to for comfort and support, but instead she meets duty and obligation and outright shame. As someone who’s struggled with a similar sort of pressure leading to abysmally low self-esteem for most of their life… Thanh’s story was relatable in many ways. Can’t say I ended up with an adorable sapphic romance in the end, but still. Fireheart Tiger is, in many ways, the story of Thanh rising up, finding her feet and finding enough strength in herself to stand firm against those coercive pressures, of finding support in unexpected places, and having the opportunity to learn that she has the right to become who she wants to be. It resonated hard with me. Writing this review, I kind of just want to go back and read it all over again.

Really, I’d love to see more stories set in this world. It feels very much full of promise, full of stories, and Fireheart Tiger is a snapshot in a larger tale. There doesn’t need to be more, but it feels as though there easily could be, if de Bodard wanted.

Really enjoyed my time with this one, and I highly recommend it to fans of queer romance and non-Western fantasy!

(Book provided in exchange for an honest review.)

I Binge-Read a Bunch of Lurlene McDaniel Novels

If you haven’t heard of Lurlene McDaniel before, then congratulations, you probably didn’t grow up in the 90s with a strange passion for morbid stories about teenagers dying from serious illnesses. Aaaand I just outed myself with that one sentence, didn’t I?

I used to love her novels. I read pretty much every one I could get my hands on. Couldn’t tell you why I found them so fascinating. I always had an interest in medicine, dating right back to childhood. When I was a kid, I would tell people I wanted to be a pediatric oncologist when I grew up, and I knew what those words meant. McDaniel’s novels about teens dealing with illnesses like cancer, HIV, cystic fibrosis, were thus right up my strange little alley.

McDaniel apparently started writing these sorts of books after her son was diagnosed with diabetes, as a way of coping with the implications of a young person dealing with a serious illness. After a while, though, I suspect that the books became less about a coping mechanism and more about capitalizing on tragedy, as so many of her novels involve the protagonist dying.

Now, I can’t say that for certain, because I’m not her. But a lot of the books I read as a kid featured death as the end-point. Not characters coping with the idea of mortality, but then dying beautifully and tragedy when their respective illnesses progress too far. There were some educational aspects to the stories, informing readers about what a lot of disabled and chronically ill people experience in their lives, but for the most part, it was pure tragedy/inspiration porn.

The first book of hers that I ever read was Sixteen and Dying, the story of a teenage girl who contracted HIV through an emergency blood transfusion as a child and who just learns of her diagnosis.It was published in 1992, when the odds of surviving and thriving with HIV or AIDS was significantly lower than it is today. As a kid, I thought it was an amazing story of a girl trying to overcome horrible odds but succumbing in the end because disease is just too powerful.

As an adult, I think, “Damn, that girl could have lived a much better life if she hadn’t been more concerned with completely denying her diagnosis for 3/4 of the novel.”

That was often a big theme with early McDaniel novels, when I think back on it. A lot of the protagonists ended up dying because they didn’t take care of themselves properly. Not freak accidents, not pure rotten luck, just… denial and poor health management. The characters were often pretty caught up in trying to appear “normal” that they would hide and deny the realities of their lives (especially from The New Cute Boy in Town) that it ended up biting them in the ass in a very fatal way. A lot of the characters were Quintessential American Teenage Girls, after all, so naturally it’s just perfectly understandable that they’d be more concerned with dating than staying healthy.

This wasn’t the case for all of them. But it was enough of a recurring theme, even in the books I read recently, that it got old very quickly.

Another theme I noticed while rereading a lot of these books was that all of the characters were from very comfortably well-off families. If there was a novel where the story’s tragic aspects came from someone getting diagnosed with a chronic illness that was easy to treat but they couldn’t afford the medication, I didn’t encounter it. No, the characters nearly always came from families who owned sizable houses, had parents with good solid well-paying jobs, where cost was never a real issue even when it very much should have been. There were some poorer characters in the books, but they were often side-characters. The struggle was never about the protagonist being able to afford necessities.

This was doubly true in the One Last Wish series, in which characters are given a huge financial gift by a mysterious benefactor, to allow them to have one great expensive hurrah and make their dreams come true before they die. Only a couple of times do I remember reading that some of that money went toward caring for their health. Most of the time, part of the story’s conflict was about how they should spend that very large amount of money.

Also… Okay, I know that in many ways, I am not the target audience for these books, and my priorities are not the same as everyone else’s. I also know that even when I was as old as most of the characters in these novels, my mindset toward fashion and attractiveness were not the average person’s mindset. But… There is a damaging mentality behind a lot of aspects of these books when it comes to appearance. In I’ll be Seeing You, the protagonist has a slight facial deformity, so when she start falling for a blind guy, she starts hoping he’ll never see her oh-so-ugly face, and part of the novel’s triumph is that her families agrees to get her cosmetic surgery to make those pesky imperfections disappear. In Goodbye Doesn’t Mean Forever, the rich character reflects that she was able to buy a real-hair wig for her best friend who was undergoing cancer treatment, and when her parents say that she probably ought to back off and focus more on her own life than that of her friend, she says, “At least I made her pretty again.”

I’m sorry, but that attitude is toxic as hell. Imagine being a kid or teen newly diagnosed with cancer, and coming across one of these books. You think to yourself, “Wow, there are books written about people like me. Maybe I’ll read this so that I don’t feel so alone and like nobody understands what I’m going through.” And then you come across crap that reinforces the idea that oh yeah, when chemo makes your hair fall out, you’re not going to be pretty anymore. Not until you have long luxurious locks again. And don’t get dare end up with any scars!

A Time to Die had a “delightful” line in it about the how when the main character, a girl with cystic fibrosis, breathed, it sounded like a kitten purring. This line was said by the dude she had a crush on (the crush was mutual, but I don’t think they actually got together in the book). This is supposed to be all sweet and sexy. Now, I don’t have CF, but my asthmatic lungs have harboured some nasty infections over the years, and lemme tell ya: the wheezy crackle of lungs filled with mucus? It ain’t sexy!

I’m going to be completely honest here: a lot of these books fed into young-me’s desire to grow up disabled. That sounds horrible. It is horrible. But between this stuff and some early disability activism, I got it into my head that the only way I would ever be special was to be sick. Look at those kids on the Easter Seals stamps! They might have cancer, but they’re smiling, and god knows my face will never be on a stamp. Look at the characters in Lurlene McDaniel’s novels. They’re pretty and tragic and people like them, and nobody’s ever going to write a book about my boring-ass life. Not unless I get terribly ill like them.

Maybe it’s universal payback that I ended up becoming disabled as an adult. “Oh, you think that makes you special, do ya? Well, enjoy pain so bad you sometimes can’t get out of bed, declining mobility, and the idea that it might take years and years of seeing multiple doctors to ever get a diagnosis or treatment plan. And still nobody’s going to write a book about your boring-ass life.”

I read a while ago that tuberculosis used to be used as a romantic plot point in old-timey novels because it gave female characters that breathy voice and retiring personality and was “a pretty death” that could be exploited for a tragic angle. McDaniel’s novels have that in spades. Not all of them… but the vast majority of them. And since they’re often fairly heavy on the romance (never fear, it’s “appropriate romance” where kissing is the most anyone does and rarely do people actually think about sex unless it’s to think about how they’re Not Ready For It), chronic illness and disability in her novels are used very much the same way tuberculosis used to be. AIDS lets you just slip gently away. Cancer lets you just slip gently away. Cystic fibrosis just lets you slip gently away. And aren’t those attractive boys just so good for loving girls who are so very sick, when any relationship is doomed to genteel tragedy?

I’m being very scathing in this post, and that’s entirely intentional. McDaniel’s novels may have been some groundbreaking representation back in the very early 90s, but once you read a few of them, the gloss really starts to rub off and you see so many of the problems underneath. I had hoped, upon doing this binge-read, that I might find something really positive to say about them, something to redeem the stories I once perversely enjoyed.

Really, the one I can speak most highly of is To Live Again, the 5th novel about Dawn Rochelle. Diagnosed with leukemia at age 13, she goes through chemo, a bone marrow transplant, worry about rejecting that bone marrow, enduring the loss of friends while she keeps living, and she does a whole lot of growing up over the course of the series. To Live Again actually addresses a less commonly-known side effect of her cancer treatment — in her final year of high school, she has a stroke that was caused by side effects from her medications, and she has to learn to deal with partial paralysis. I don’t see too many stories address the fact that just because you’re in remission, just because you might even be past that 5-year milestone and be considered cured, sometimes you’re going to have to deal with additional struggles brought on by the very thing that saved you.

When so many stories about cancer either end in death or, “Congratulations, you’re cured, now cancer is just this bad memory tucked firmly away in your past,” it was actually refreshing to encounter something that said, “You’d think that, but.”

So do these books hold up to my youthful memories? Not one freaking bit. They’re honestly quite bad, and not even just from the standpoint of being tragedy/inspiration porn. Where once I thought that the pure medical aspects of the story were fascinating and educational, the ones I read recently had so very many errors. In one, a lumbar puncture was confused with a bone marrow aspiration. One involves a needle stuck in your spine, the other involves a needle stuck in your hip. And I’d hand-wave this as a simple mistake if I hadn’t seen both procedures referred to correctly in multiple other novels. They are so terribly bad, filled with misinformation and toxic attitudes and characters that could be carbon copies of other characters, just with different names.

When Rachael Lippincott’s Five Feet Apart came out, I read it. It had its problems (contradictory medical info, a Bury Your Gays trope example, etc), but it was a lot better than McDaniel’s stuff. A lot of people in the disabled community liked it. I saw a lot of people with cystic fibrosis comment that it was good representation for the lives that they live. I had my reasons for not liking it, but I can appreciate that others do.

Then Lippincott wrote All This Time. And The Lucky List. And they’re getting the same kind of good reviews I still see Lurlene McDaniel’s books get. And I can’t help but wonder if this is the beginning of a new wave of tragedy/inspiration porn in YA novels. Written better and with greater accuracy and representation, yes, and I’m not going to pretend those aren’t good things, but as someone who read a whole load of McDaniel’s novels, I can’t help but see loads of similarities, and it makes me anxious with the idea that someone (not necessarily Lippincott) will take the same road. Going from well-intentioned to capitalizing on the experienced pain of people who already find that most of their representation is, well, Lurlene McDaniel novels.

Here’s hoping that’s not what happens.

Beyond, by Mercedes Lackey

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Author’s website | Publisher’s website
Publication date – June 15, 2021

Summary: Within the Eastern Empire, Duke Kordas Valdemar rules a tiny, bucolic Duchy that focuses mostly on horse breeding. Anticipating the day when the Empire’s exploitative and militant leaders would not be content to leave them alone, Korda’s father set out to gather magicians in the hopes of one day finding a way to escape and protect the people of the Duchy from tyranny.

Kordas has lived his life looking over his shoulder. The signs in the Empire are increasingly dire. Under the direction of the Emperor, mages have begun to harness the power of dark magics, including blood magic, the powers of the Abyssal Planes, and the binding and “milking” of Elemental creatures.

But then one of the Duchy’s mages has a breakthrough. There is a way to place a Gate at a distance so far from the Empire that it is unlikely the Emperor can find or follow them as they evacuate everyone that is willing to leave.

But time is running out, and Kordas has been summoned to the Emperor’s Court.

Can his reputation as a country bumpkin and his acting skills buy him and his people the time they need to flee? Or will the Emperor lose patience, invade to strip Valdemar of everything of worth, and send its conscripted people into the front lines of the Imperial wars?

Thoughts: Valdemar’s founding has been something of a mythical thing ever since it was first mentioned in the very first Heralds of Valdemar novel, Arrow’s of the Queen. A Baron from a brutal imperial regime in the east sought to free his people from tyranny, and so took them on a long journey far away, beyond the reach of the Empire, where they settled in what eventually became the Kingdom of Valdemar. One of those situations where one man who cared people but was powerful to change an abusive system, so he left the system and created a new one. A different kind of heroism than the kind you see in fantasy stories where one man takes down an entire corrupt regime, but heroism none the less.

In Beyond, we start on Baron Valdemar’s journey to freedom, shedding light on the myth and making it real and relatable, at least within the confines of the world’s lore.

Now, I’ll grant you, this wasn’t quite the story I was expecting. It’s not that the description of Baron Valdemar’s journey away from the Empire was different than how it was briefly described in a few other novels and short stories, but as is often the case with more recent Valdemar novels, it’s all the stuff in between the story’s bones that make me raise an eyebrow in confusion. It seems lately like Lackey wants to tie everything together in neat packages, to have everything connect to everything else, to the point of creating weirdly complicated setups to explain things that didn’t really need an explanation in the first place.

Case in point, the vrondi. Now, vrondi are little air spirits that were largely introduced in the Last Herald-Mage novels and are a key reason why mages were driven insane if they tried to do magic in Valdemar for so long. They were sort of roped into a plan to have them keep an eye on any mages who weren’t also Herald-Mages, watching them until a Herald-Mage could come check them out. Then the Herald-Mages died off, and for a long time mages in Valdemar were just constantly watched by a growing number of invisible presences. Vrondi are also the reason why Heralds can do what they call Truth Spell, which can detect lies or even force someone to be honest. Okay. All makes sense. Nothing contradictory here.

Except that in Beyond, it’s established that vrondi weren’t just “we exist all over the world” natural spiritual creatures; they came with Baron Valdemar to these new unexplored lands after he freed them from a convoluted Imperial scheme that bound them to living dolls and forced them to become slaves. And while I can understand that they felt indebted to Valdemar for his actions in freeing them, it seems rather cruel to have bound them to the spell that made them watch for mages in the first place. They gave permission then, yes, but it begs the question of whether feeling indebted to someone’s legacy, hundreds of years later, would actually make them so willing to bind themselves to that task. It created a weird moral quandary when reading Beyond, and when this book’s story is added to the whole of Valdemar’s lore, it contained aspects that made me quite uncomfortable.

Which would have been find if it was something designed to make the reader uncomfortable, something done to provoke thought and consideration. Instead it felt more like Lackey didn’t think that journeying into unknown lands and trying to keep people safe from dangers on all sides would be an interesting enough story, and so tried to shoehorn in something for long-time readers to recognize, even when it didn’t need to be there and made later books on the timeline make less sense.

It wasn’t that Beyond was a bad book. It was pretty on par with a lot of Lackey’s recent work. But for me, the series peaked a while ago, I think, and each new foray back into the world leaves me increasingly disappointed. From stories complicated in ways that they don’t need to be, to her new strange habit of trying to make modern references that don’t really make any sense (this time it was characters calling a dog a “doggo” and a “pupper,” and yes, they were mages so old it could be argued this was just slang from another era, but really, it’s just a nod to modern real-world slang… which I guess is still better than commentary on the Quiverfull movement or the Scooby-Doo references…) The characters were interesting, the tyrannical debauchery of the Empire was honestly a fascinating setting, and I was interested in seeing how things would play out, but it didn’t hold my interest the way earlier books in the series have done in the past.

And yet, every time I say that I’m done with the series, a new book comes out and I’m dragged back in, out of sheer curiosity if nothing else.

If you’re of like mind to me, thinking that the Valdemar series peaked before the books with Mags started, then this is one I can safely say is easy to pass over without missing much. If you’re a fan of Lackey’s more recent entries into Valdemar, then this one will still be right up your alley, since it’s very much indicative of her modern writing. I can’t say it’s one I’d recommend, per se, but as I said, it isn’t bad, and I can still see it appealing to a certain subset of fans.

(Book received in exchange for an honest review.)

Ready Player Two, by Ernest Cline

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Author’s website | Publisher’s website
Publication date – November 24, 2020

Summary: AN UNEXPECTED QUEST. TWO WORLDS AT STAKE. ARE YOU READY?

Days after winning OASIS founder James Halliday’s contest, Wade Watts makes a discovery that changes everything.

Hidden within Halliday’s vaults, waiting for his heir to find, lies a technological advancement that will once again change the world and make the OASIS a thousand times more wondrous—and addictive—than even Wade dreamed possible.

With it comes a new riddle, and a new quest—a last Easter egg from Halliday, hinting at a mysterious prize.

And an unexpected, impossibly powerful, and dangerous new rival awaits, one who’ll kill millions to get what he wants.

Wade’s life and the future of the OASIS are again at stake, but this time the fate of humanity also hangs in the balance.

Thoughts: I enjoyed Ready Player One a lot. It wasn’t until later, after reading some other opinions and giving the book a second look that I really started to see some serious problems with the pop culture glorification and the truly terrifying amounts of gatekeeping the characters embodied. I can see why there was gatekeeping, given who the characters were and what they were doing, but geek culture already had a huge problem with that, and Ready Player One seemed to say, “Yeah, okay, but what if making other people feel like they know less actually gets you cool things in the end?!”

Now we come to the sequel, Ready Player Two, and wow, there are just so many more problems! Where the first book was at least fun to read during many scenes, this one was mostly the opposite, I’m sad to say.

Strap in, friends, because this is not going to be a positive review. Nor a short one.

The premise of this novel is that new tech has been found that allows users of the OASIS, that gigantic MMORPG upon which 99% of human interaction and economy relies in Cline’s near-future world, to essentially port their very minds into the game, allowing for total immersion in a way that resembled a directed lucid dream. Only the once-founder of the OASIS, James Halliday, did the same thing at one point, leading to a faulty but autonomous NPC version of himself running around and demanding that since he once scanned the mind of his lifelong crush, Wade and his friends should set out on a quest to bring her to life, so to speak, as an NPC, so that he can have another chance to be with her. To ensure that everyone complies, he locks all of the mind-scanned users within the OASIS and won’t let them log out, holding millions of people hostage and giving the group a 12 hour window in which to solve all of the riddles and quests that will lead to his goal.

In other words, the characters from the previous novel have an even greater quest to accomplish with less time, fewer resources, higher stakes… and of course they manage, because what once took years now must obviously take less than a day because that’s just what the plot calls for.

It felt very much like a problem a lot of sequels have, though usually I see it in TV shows and movies rather than books. It’s not enough to meet and match what the first thing accomplished. There’s this assumption that one has to go even further beyond, to top the previous story or else nobody will be interested. Got to make things bigger, make the consequences or the quest more grand, or else nobody will care because they already saw this story.

The problem comes when you reach too far, and give the audience a higher-stakes plot that must be (and will be) fulfilled within a tighter time limit, despite it not making sense to do so. It could be argued that the characters have so many more resources at their disposal this time around, since they’re all in control of massive wealth and in-game power, but they had a significant amount of that by about the halfway point of the previous novel too, and the omnipotent powers that Wade gained for winning Halliday’s original east egg quest have been stripped from him in Ready Player Two, so you can’t even excuse it through that. The stakes might be higher and so the group might be more motivated, yes, but that doesn’t automatically mean they can actually accomplish everything in the given time period.

But the plot demanded it, and so…

Wade, for his part, comes off as initially a pretty terrible person in this book. It’s a case of “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” since he openly admits that he used his in-game god-powers to bankrupt and destroy the characters of people who so much as said mean things about him and his friends. And in a world where there are no second lives, are no backup accounts, killing a character means that characters starts over again with nothing. Since so much of out-of-game economics are tied to the game… Well, let’s just say it’s like whenever you die in a video game, the bank shows up at your door to repossess your house and all your belongings.

Yes, Wade does change from this mindset thanks to therapy and effort, but then you get to the part where he can stalk any account he chooses, and gives Aech and Shoto the benefit of respect and privacy, but decides he’s still so hung up on Art3mis that he has to keep tabs on her at all times, and oh yeah, this definitely presents him as a character I want to give a shit about for an entire other novel…

Cline’s writing throughout the book was fine, if a bit unbalanced at times. Some scenes rush by relatively quickly, others take for-freaking-ever to resolve, to the point where I legitimately considered skipping past large chunks of the whole “battle 7 versions of Prince” section because it was just a whole lot of running around, gathering items, and listening to Aech talk about how awesome Prince was. The characters themselves… Honestly did not quite feel the same as they were in Ready Player One, occasionally feeling like I was reading a tolerable but not-quite-there fanfic presentation of them. This was especially true in Shoto’s case, as he went from being rather formal in the first book to spouting English-language jokes and slang in this book. Perhaps that could be hand-waved because he was using translation software and it could be argued that’s the fault of the software… but that’s a lot of reading between the lines to do to explain some character degradation.

Though I will admit that the constant pop culture references got stale very very quickly here, and for the record, I didn’t find them stale in Ready Player One. Every character’s obsession with 80s pop culture made sense, given what they were working toward. But in Ready Player Two, the pop culture craze seems to still stay decently in the 80s but also occasionally skipping forward a few decades to reference popular things from later decades. But only up to current day. And sure, it can be argued that Cline doesn’t exactly know what media is going to be popular in 2025 and so can’t reference it, but it gives the peculiar impression that after a certain point, no new media was really made in Wade’s world. It’s all just stuff that was popular in the past, because something something reader nostalgia.

Yes, I’m being caustic here. But if you give me a reason for characters to talk in pop culture references from the 80s all the time, I will believe you and accept it, even when I don’t get the references. Give me no reason that they’re familiar The Matrix, though, and I call bullshit.

Which brings me to a very personal gripe about one reference… Art3mis mentions that putting your whole consciousness into a game is a bad idea, because hasn’t anyone ever seen Sword Art Online? And yeah, SAO does involve that. But you know what other anime involved that, which was before SAO’s time? Freaking .hack! You know, that series that had multiple anime seasons and spin-offs, multiple video games, manga adaptations, novels, and also involved people getting dangerously stuck in an MMO. A series which seems to have been largely forgotten in the wake of SAO’s popularity, to the point where it seems like many people have no idea that the concept of people getting stuck in a video game even existed before Sword Art Online was conceived. SAO is more popular now. But .hack had the Western stage first, and it bothers me a lot to see people continue to overlook it, especially in a novel where characters once argued constantly about how relevant obscure 80s movies were. Things like that made it seem as though Cline was writing not so much what the characters were likely to know, but what the book’s audience was likely to be interested in at the time of the book’s release.

This isn’t me gatekeeping. This isn’t me saying, “If you only know Sword Art Online but don’t know .hack, then you’re not a true fan of a very specific subgenre.” This is me saying that the characters probably had as much reason to know about both, but the author chose to reference only the one that the book’s audience was likely to know, despite throwing out all sorts of references to things the audience probably didn’t know in the previous novel.

But now I want to talk about the book’s serious moral quandary, and for that, I’m going to have to discuss some huge spoilers, so if you still plan on reading this and don’t want to book’s ending to be ruined, then feel free to not read the rest of this review.

Okay, so a thread that runs through the bulk of the novel is that Art3mis does not like this new brain-scan technology and refuses to use it, being the only holdout of the group. It contributes to the huge rift that has formed between her and Wade. She’s of the opinion that it hooks users too much into the game and prevents them from existing in the real world, which is something the group actively took pains to prevent at the end of Ready Player One, ensuring that players absolutely had to log off sometimes and go interact in meatspace. But at the end, when it allows for Og and Kira to be reunited as sentient NPCs even after their physical bodies have both died, she basically pulls a, “Oh Wade, you were right all along, this technology is so wonderful!” as though all of her other objections just don’t matter anymore.

(Plus their relationship just sort of starts up again almost randomly, without any resolution to their problems. They go through danger together, beat a great foe, and then it’s just sort of casually mentioned later that oh, they’re back together now. Readers didn’t even see them discuss getting back together. It just happened off the page and we have to take Wade’s declaration of it as fact, I guess.)

But there’s more. The reason that Kira is in the game as a sentient NPC to begin with is because Halliday ported her mind in there without her consent, an act which many characters are horrified over and think was despicable. But when push comes to shove, they make the decision to turn the minds of every brain-scanned OASIS user into sentient NPCs in a self-contained OASIS simulation without their knowledge or consent, to keep their self-contained OASIS simulation fresh and full of real minds during a long interstellar journey and to keep consenting sentient NPCs company, because getting informed consent would just be too tricky. They take the attitude of, “What people don’t know won’t hurt them,” even though they acknowledge it was a clear violation when someone did that to Kira.

And at that point, I was thankful the book was pretty much over, because the self-righteous hypocrisy made me very angry.

Ready Player Two isn’t a bad book, per se. It’s fine. It’s okay. It’s reasonably entertaining. But it has a lot of problems, both moral and technical, and I found it considerably less enjoyable than its predecessor. It’s not one I regret reading, per se, because unless I absolutely hate a story or series, I tend to want to see if through to the end, even if I’m not always having the best time with it. But it is one that I’ll mostly end up remembering for all the issues I had with it, rather than the sort of exciting high-stakes adventure it was meant to be.

The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, by K S Villoso

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Author’s website | Publisher’s website
Publication date – July 23, 2019

Summary: “They called me the Bitch Queen, the she-wolf, because I murdered a man and exiled my king the night before they crowned me.”

Born under the crumbling towers of her kingdom, Queen Talyien was the shining jewel and legacy of the bloody War of the Wolves. It nearly tore her nation apart. But her arranged marriage to the son of a rival clan heralds peace.

However, he suddenly disappears before their reign can begin, and the kingdom is fractured beyond repair.

Years later, he sends a mysterious invitation to meet. Talyien journeys across the sea in hopes of reconciling their past. An assassination attempt quickly dashes those dreams. Stranded in a land she doesn’t know, with no idea whom she can trust, Talyien will have to embrace her namesake.

A Wolf of Oren-yaro is not tamed.

Thoughts: Before I get into the meat of this review, I’d like to state that I’ve started taking some new medications to try and help various health issues in my life, and those medications make me a little bit spaced out at times and make it tough to fully gather my thoughts. So if anything in this review doesn’t make sense or makes weird leaps of logic, please take it as a given that it’s because of my meds, or because this book was just that good, or a combination of both.

It’s probably both.

The Wolf of Oren-Yaro is one of those fantasy novels that seems, right from the outset, so very well planned and plotted and expressed that sometimes it’s easy to forget that you’re not reading historical fiction. The world is so finely detailed, the mix of cultures and mentions of different languages and dialects, all of it combine into something that feels incredibly real. As we follow Queen Talyien’s journey to reunite with her runaway husband, layers and layers are peeled back, revealing a rich and complex story coming out from what at first seemed relatively simple.

Well, as simple as politics and “It’s Complicated” relationships are, at any rate.

Talyien is one of those characters who I think it’s easy to both like and dislike, depending on the situation. I can’t help but admire her tenacity, her desire to do what she thinks is right, and her sharp mind, and in many of the situations she found herself in, I agreed with her judgment calls. On the flip side, those traits came with drawbacks that kept her from seeing things she didn’t want to see. Her strong desire to reunite with her husband, partly from love and loyalty and partly due to the political arrangement that came about from their marriage, could seem admirable… if it wasn’t for the fact that she kept overlooking that he really didn’t want the same thing, and that he didn’t view her in the same light she viewed him. Talyien wasn’t what I’d call a trusting person by nature, but she seemed to have difficulty recognizing the machinations of others, the way she was constantly maneuvered into positions that were very much to her disadvantage. While she was committed to doing her best for the kingdom (queendom?) she led, she did have more than a touch of naiveté about her, which was frustrating at times.

So Talyien’s journey throughout The Wolf of Oren-Yaro wasn’t just the physical journey of getting her husband back, or trying to solve the increasingly complex set of circumstances surrounding the reunion (assassins, betrayal, and disappearances abound!), but her journey to see the world in a new light. She’s not the same person at the end of the book as she was in the beginning. She’s seen the lengths people will go to get what they want, she’s seen the reality of life for people she wouldn’t have even noticed in the past, and she learns far more about the what’s going to be expected of her as even her political situation changes. She’s still very much herself at the end, but it’s a self that’s more mature, in some ways, or at least more apt to see the sheer amount of deception around her.

Villoso’s gorgeous writing really brings this Asian-inspired world to life, showing the reader the highs and lows of various locations, the best and the worst of people, and all their varied complexities; nobody is wholly good or wholly bad. With possibly one exception, though I’m not going to spoil that for people who have yet to read this book. Despite having very little ability to concentrate on things lately due to my ongoing health issues, once I started reading The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, I kept being motivated to push past my limits, to read just a little further, even when my eyes didn’t want to focus properly or I realized I’d just spent 5 minutes staring blankly at the same page, because I was that invested in the story. I know I’ve said this about other novels, but it stands true here just as much as there: this is a novel that really draws you in and refuses to let you go. Once you give it even a slight chance to ensnare you, you too will find yourself pushing past your limits, doing the, “Just one more chapter,” thing, until before you know it, you’ve reached the end and there’s nothing else to do but reach for the sequel and continue the epic fantasy adventure.

Long live the Bitch Queen!

(Book received in exchange for an honest review.)

Jade War, by Fonda Lee

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Author’s website | Publisher’s website
Publication date – July 23, 2019

Summary: On the island of Kekon, the Kaul family is locked in a violent feud for control of the capital city and the supply of magical jade that endows trained Green Bone warriors with supernatural powers they alone have possessed for hundreds of years.

Beyond Kekon’s borders, war is brewing. Powerful foreign governments and mercenary criminal kingpins alike turn their eyes on the island nation. Jade, Kekon’s most prized resource, could make them rich – or give them the edge they’d need to topple their rivals.

Faced with threats on all sides, the Kaul family is forced to form new and dangerous alliances, confront enemies in the darkest streets and the tallest office towers, and put honor aside in order to do whatever it takes to ensure their own survival – and that of all the Green Bones of Kekon.

Thoughts: Sequel to the absolutely incredible Jade City, Jade War dives back into a world where jade means power and the two ruling/warring families of Kekon are still at each others’ throats against a backdrop of increasing social change. Political alliances are being made and broken, lines shift and change, and progress marches ever onward while people try to maintain a semblance of the lives they know while everything around them seems to grow less familiar by the day. Jade smuggling, underhanded deals, old vendettas, war on the horizon, and cross-cultural clashes are just some of the struggles the Kaul family must deal with in this story where nobody is safe.

And I mean that. Jade City and Jade War are books where you can’t get too attached to any character, because there’s every chance they’ll end up dead at some point. For all that I accepted this in the first book, it was still shocking to me every time it happened, because the characters are so well written and grow so familiar to the reader that it seems impossible for the story to exist without them. And yet. Death is the reality faced when clashing clans war in the streets, when old enemies raise their heads and seek vengeance, and when navigating the treacherous waters of unfamiliar and hostile societies. During a few scenes, I was especially tense, as some of my favourite characters were in danger of meeting the same fate as so many others, and I was on the edge of my figurative seat waiting to see how it all turned out for them.

Jade War wastes no time in asking some brutally hard questions. Can you still be part of a family when you’ve forsworn the thing the family is most concerned with? Is it acceptable to sell something sacred to people who don’t appreciate it the way you do, in order to gain advantage over those who seek to destroy you? Is it honourable to push someone to do something dishonourable? How much bloodshed is acceptable to keep valuable cultural traditions strong, or is it better to sacrifice everything you hold dear in the name of peace? And, in nearly every instance, where does the line get drawn? There are no easy answers here, there never are, but these are the issues that occupy the thoughts of so many characters, from the minor to the major. You get explorations of cultural value, of a culture’s place in the context of a wider world. You see a society where that which what we would deem as a seedy underbelly, a criminal organization to be stamped out, is actually just an accepted part of daily life. One that does a lot of good for the people.

The clans honestly remind me a lot about what I’ve read of yakuza families. Probably other organized crime families too. I remember many years ago reading about how, after a large earthquake in Japan, the yakuza were one of the first on the scene to deliver emergency supplies to those displaced in the disaster. They weren’t bound by the same red tape that the government was, so they could just show up and help people who needed help. Or an interview with a yakuza member talking about how one of his colleagues (probably the wrong word but it’s the best I can think of) ran an orphanage, and sure, that orphanage was a tax haven, but it also was a good place for kids to be when they had nowhere else to go. Handing out blankets and bottles of water after a disaster is exactly what I can imagine Hilo doing. I can see Shae in her office, smiling at the thought that an orphanage is both providing for kids and also making sure the family sneaks by paying less in taxes. Beating the crap out of someone who is harassing the owner of a clan-supported business? Sure, that’s absolutely a thing the Maik brothers would do. These are the sorts of characters you will come to know and love as you read both Jade City and Jade War.

The Green Bone Saga books are filled with grey-and-grey morality, where you might be able to identify who is wrong, but it’s hard to say that anybody’s really right. The best you can say of the characters is that they’re all doing what they think is best, whether that be for their families, their clans, or themselves. And that leads to characters doing morally reprehensible things in the name of what they believe to be right. It’s hard to call the Kaul family “the good guys” when they’ll undermine businesses for their own benefit, or when one of them kills in order to essentially kidnap a baby in order to raise it within the family. There are no good guys, not really. There are people who are worse than others, but I don’t think there’s a single character in these books who hasn’t done something awful in the name of loyalty and duty, nobody who hasn’t stepped over someone else in the pursuit of ambition.

And honestly, I kind of love that. There are plenty of stories out there where the lines are clearly drawn, where you know the right side from the wrong side, where people fight against injustice or evil or oppressive regimes. There’s nothing wrong with stories like that. I love them too. But sometimes I crave a good portrayal of the messy reality of life, where there are no easy answers and no clear examples of good versus bad. The world is full of beauty and brutality, love and honour and violence. It’s complicated and oh so real, and I love it so much. Lee has created such a complete world that every piece of it feels real, every piece fits into the complicated pattern that a fully fleshed out world requires. There’s a stunning amount of world-building in these books, and Lee should feel proud that it all came together so brilliantly, conveyed to the reader in ways that at no point feel forced or trite.

I find myself in a similar situation to when I read and reviewed the first book. Jade War was so astounding, so fantastic that I have a hard time collecting my thoughts into something coherent. It’s the sort of book that makes you want to just hand copies to people and say, “Read this because it’s so freaking good!” To so eloquently portray the clash and blend of technology and magic, modernity and tradition, is no easy feat, but Lee handles it all so well that I ended up finishing Jade War and wanting to pick up Jade City and start the whole journey all over again. My reviews can never do this series justice. The best book are always like this for me. I try to put something together to convey just how much I loved them, and in the end I sit back, unsatisfied, knowing that I couldn’t address half the things I wanted to, and none of them properly express my full thoughts and emotions.

In the end, all I can say is that I wholeheartedly recommend this series. If you enjoyed Jade City then you will adore Jade War. I can’t think of another series like this; it stands proudly as a stellar example of what one might call “gangster fantasy.” I can’t do it full justice; it’s the sort of book you have to experience for yourself in order to see just how truly amazing it is, from beginning to end, in all of its glorious violence and heart. The clan is my blood, and the Pillar is its master. Do not miss your chance to read these books.

(Book received in exchange for an honest review.)

The Queen’s Weapons, by Anne Bishop

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Author’s website | Publisher’s website
Publication date – March 9, 2021

Summary: They are Warlord Princes, men born to serve and protect. They are the Queen’s Weapons, men born to destroy the Queen’s enemies–no matter what face that enemy wears.

Daemonar Yaslana knows how to be bossy yet supportive–traits he shares with his father, the Demon Prince, and his uncle, the High Lord of Hell. Within his generation of the family, he assumes the role of protector, supporting his sister Titian’s artistic efforts and curbing his cousin Jaenelle Saetien’s more adventurous ideas. But when a young Eyrien Queen, someone Titian thought was a friend, inflicts an emotional wound, Daemonar’s counterattack brings him under the tutelage of Witch, the Queen whose continued existence is known only to a select few.

As Daemonar is confronted by troubling changes within and around the family, he sees warnings that a taint in the Blood might be reappearing. Daemonar, along with his father and uncle, must uncover the source of a familiar evil–and Daemon Sadi, the High Lord of Hell, may be forced into making a terrible choice.

Thoughts: It’s not even close to a secret that I adore the Black Jewels novels. I love the characters, I love the world, and I often turn to these books when I’m in need of a comfort re-read. And while I definitely had some issues with the previous novel, The Queen’s Bargain (mostly in that one of the characters kept doing things she absolutely knew very well to not do), I still overall enjoyed it. And I fully expected to enjoy this latest offering in the series, The Queen’s Weapons, just as much.

The Queen’s Weapons is set a good few years after The Queen’s Bargain, with Jaenelle Saetien and Daemonar fast growing up and showing just who they’re going to be as adults. In Daemonar’s case, he’s definitely turning into the model of a Warlord Prince, very much like this father. In Jaenelle Saetien’s case… It’s a lot more complicated, as she quite frankly grows up to be quite the brat, convinced that the only way to come into her own is to rebel against very idea of her namesake, the Witch and Queen that everyone around her knew and loved. This is understandable pretty damn upsetting to Surreal and Daemon, but it only gets worse when signs emerge that the taint, once thought wiped out, has set down in Kaeleer and is starting to grow and corrupt once more.

I admit, when I first read the description of this book many months ago, I had to raise a skeptical eyebrow. In the original trilogy, it was a huge deal when Jaenelle sacrificed herself and her power to wipe out the taint that was threatening the Blood. It was a major event that wiped out most of the Blood across an entire Realm. And here it’s just, “Oh yeah, that thing. Yup, it’s back.” I was a little bit wary of how this would be handled. Not because I thought Bishop couldn’t do such a concept justice, but because I’ve seen authors, over time, wanting to write more in their beloved worlds but lacking a solid idea for a story, and so just bringing back a once-vanquished evil. Even if it made no sense.

But thankfully, it did make sense here. A reason was given for the taint’s reemergence, and that reason stands up to scrutiny. That was quite a relief!

While the Black Jewels series started off with so very much abuse and torture and things that deserve a buttload of trigger warnings, a lot of those things were absent in later books. Their echoes were still felt, of course, because one doesn’t recover from centuries of abuse, for instance, just because they’re now in a happy relationship. Scars are still there, they don’t fade so easily. But in terms of scenes of active abuse and assault? No, they faded from a lot of the text in future books, which likely made said books a bit more approachable for new readers. (Someone could read Cassidy’s duology, The Shadow Queen and Shalador’s Lady, for instance, without having read the core trilogy and without needing so many of those trigger warnings.) It’s sometimes easy to forget that the series started with a corrupt culture filled with violence and rape. And since The Queen’s Weapons deals with the taint coming back, I feel it’s worth pointing out that some of those issues do rear their ugly heads once again, and it’s worth warning people that yes, this book does contain rape, and abuse, and a very unsettling scene in which a kitten is left to die. You might well need to know that before picking it up.

And it’s with that context that we see a depiction of someone who knows very well that such things are wrong, but who has her own agenda and is willing to turn a blind eye to some things, to make excuses, if those things don’t like up with what she wants. Jaenelle Saetien clung to the wrong sort of people, convinced that they weren’t using her and weren’t malicious and weren’t behind any of the increasingly concerning instances of abuse, because she needed something that she was convinced only they could provide. She’s a character study in desperation and willful ignorance.

Much as I hate to say it, I could relate a bit to Jaenelle Saetien’s concerns about living in somebody’s shadow. It’s something I’ve had to confront in my life as well, and that I still struggle with at times, so even when I hated who she was becoming and how she was behaving, when things switched to her viewpoint and we got a look at her thoughts and emotions, I couldn’t help but remember how many times I had felt the same way. It made me reflect on how I could well have ended up the same way, someone who was willing to overlook terrible things in order to be accepted by people who had no expectations of me. There but for the grace of something-or-other, I suppose. I wouldn’t say that Jaenelle Saetien is a bad person, so much as she’s someone who could easily become so, if not handled the right way. She balanced on the edge of a very particular knife, and it took extraordinary events to determine which side of that knife she’d end up on.

I do want to take a moment to mention something in particular here. I don’t know if it was intended this way or not, but the twisted nostalgia for Hayllian items and pieces of Dorothea’s abusive rule struck me as analogous to the way some people have this weird idealized nostalgia for times past, especially when it comes to Nazi propaganda and far-right ideology. A conviction that “the right sort of people” should be in power, that it’s fine to push others down if it comparatively raises up you and yours, you see that mentality expressed a lot in people who won’t call themselves racist, no, but will express that it’s “those people” who are keeping everyone else down. There are people out there who seek out and collect Nazi memorabilia, with an eye to glorifying the Nazi regime and all of its atrocities. Atrocities, of course, against “the wrong people.” I can’t say for sure if this was Bishop’s specific intent here, but it sure read that way to me. And given that Daemon et al are the good guys of the story, the ones we’re supposed to empathize with and agree with, and they’re all vehemently against bringing back the sort of culture that brought torture and death to themselves and those they loved… Yeah, it’s not hard to see which side of the line we’re supposed to stand on.

The Queen’s Weapons addressed many of the smaller issues that I encountered in The Queen’s Bargain, which I was happy to see. Chiefly, the relationship between Surreal and Daemon. I won’t lie here — I have never been a fan of those two together. I can see why they stayed together once Jaenelle Saetien came into the picture, absolutely, but the situation that led to it… Eh, I have strong feelings about it, and I may get around to discussing them someday. Either way, a good deal of the friction in the previous novel stemmed from their relationship, and from both of them trying to be who they weren’t, especially to each other. Especially after Daemon learned of Witch’s continued presence. But the way things worked out in The Queen’s Weapons felt satisfying. It felt like they figured themselves and each other out, and were prepared to move forward with what that knowledge meant. It might not be a happy conclusion, per se, but it was a very satisfying one.

As always with these books, there’s so much that I want to say, much of which can’t be fit into a review because then it would devolve into semi-nonsensical, “Ooh, does this mean that?” and, “So siddown and lemme tell y’all my theories about this scene!” What I can say for certain is that it was wonderful to return, once again, to a world I love and characters I adore, to walk a while in the Shadow Realm and revel in Bishop’s delicious dark fantasy narrative. It was a treat to see the younger characters mature and hold their own in the story. It’s a book I absolutely will reread, and discuss at length with my partner (because we’re both huge geeks for this series). Even moreso than The Queen’s Bargain, The Queen’s Weapons is a worthy addition to the series that holds a beloved place in my life, and I can absolutely recommend it to other fans of the series.

(Book received in exchange for an honest review.)