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I love the concept of the Wayward Children series as a whole, but individually a few of the books have been hit or miss for me. If I had to pick, In an Absent Dream and this book have been my favorites out of the whole series, largely in that they both focus on a single character and so the plot and theme can be a lot more tight in the short space of a novella.

Lost in the Moment and Found follows Antsy, who runs away from horrific step-dad, finds herself lost, and steps through a door into the Shop Where the Lost Things Goes. (I also deeply appreciated the Author's Note which precedes the book and content warns for grooming and adult gaslighting, but also gives the reassurance that "before anything can actually happen, Antsy runs.")

In this book, the reader gets teased with larger worldbuilding hints about the Doors and how they operate, but thematically for Antsy it's all about abuse and loss. She's literally lost and in a shop that collects lost things; she has lost trust in adults and the safety of the world; by the end, everything she's lost all ties together really satisfyingly. Some more spoilery thoughts.

Six months after Abby was born, her mother sat her down in the living room and took her hands, as she'd done twice before. Antsy sat rigid, having learned that these were the moments where her life changed for the worse, where things she didn't even know could be lost were ripped away from her and thrown aside.

This is a minor detail, and I certainly differ a lot from Antsy on many points, but boy howdy did this quote hit me right in the psychologically unsafe "serious conversations" feelings.

I deeply enjoyed System Collapse--it was a nice followup book to the events of the previous one and I don't think could stand alone. Murderbot has certainly been through a lot, but the last book was particularly intense and it makes sense that there's lasting effects from it. It felt like a smaller and more internally-focused book with less snark and more trama, but I am here for that.

To me at least, Murderbot and its series feels like the embodiment of vulnerability avoidance: handwaving, the first few books seemed like Murderbot coping with learning it cared and people caring about it; Network Effect was about """relationships"" (with ART and 2 and 3); this book in particular explored the vulnerability of trauma and being partially human (or at the very least having some fleshy parts). I think it helps to better situate Murderbot as a construct--not a bot, not human, but somewhere in between with the problems of both.

On the surface, this certainly looks like a shift in Murderbot's competence. (It's certainly a shift in its self-perceived competence; Murderbot both seemingly does a good job while also beating itself up for not being perfect; it's hard to see past the narrative bias.)

Previous Murderbot dealt with situations and humans out of its control (still does but used to too), but in this book there's an extra struggle of coping with its own [redacted]. Given that it has people around it that care, it also has to deal with the shame of these people covering for it too. Dr. Mensah dealing with her own trauma during the last book felt like a nice foreshadowing here for what Murderbot is going through here.

Bonus joy moments: * the documentary! * ART being a jerk to both Iris and Murderbot * ART and Holism butting heads

The Hollow Places is a horror novel by T. Kingfisher. The premise is that newly divorced Kara goes back to live in her uncle's curio museum; when a mysterious hole in the wall appears and goes to what seems to be another dimension, she and her barista friend investigate. Overall, horror is not usually my cuppa but this was an enjoyable creepy ride (and I'll read anything by T. Kingfisher at this point).

But he groaned and stomped around the hall for a few minutes, then said, "Okay. But this is how people die in horror movies, you know."

"You're not the teensiest bit curious?

"I'm incredibly curious! I've just also seen horror movies!"

This book is intensely creepy at times, and the horror elements all the more unsettling for being fuzzy and unseen and unknowable. I wish a little that there was a little bit more character development or reveal (such as a more tight thematic coupling of Kara's backstory or marriage with the present events). However, I really enjoyed both the banter and also the centering of the museum as a welcoming and protective home rather than playing it just for creeps.

The author's note said that this was based on the 1907 short story The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood and I wish I had read that first so that I could understand some references that would have passed me by otherwise.

I reread this book for the SFFBookClub this month.

Personally, I deeply enjoyed this book and series, but I think it is not for everybody. I highly recommend folks read the first two chapters online here to get a taste of the voice: www.tor.com/2016/04/12/excerpts-ada-palmer-too-like-the-lightning-chapters-1-and-2/. Mycroft the narrator is self-deprecating, frequently addresses the reader, and is most definitely a very unreliable (and heavily edited) narrator. You can read it in the link above, but never ever have I ever seen a book do so much world-building via content warnings.

This book (and series) is trying to do so much, and regardless of whether you feel like it worked or not, it's hard not to be in awe of the ambition and the sheer density of ideas threaded together here. In the first chapter we've got flying cars, a secret magic kid who can turn toys into real life, mention of a Church War and sensayers (religious therapists) in the wake of it, Mycroft letting the reader know that he's misgendering everybody for ~reasons~, legal punishment alternatives in a Servicer system, questions about free will, and alternative family structures called bashes. This is before we get into 18th century philosophy, ethics, religion, and Greek myth. FOOF

This book is really catnip for me even on a reread; I find Mycroft to be extremely engaging as a narrator, and I appreciate so much how all of these details are spooled out at just the right pace to keep me intrigued but not overwhelmed. It felt like each chapter was carefully crafted to introduce a new location, bring in some world details and history, focus on a slightly different set of world leaders, and push the mystery investigation of the 7-10 list theft forward. It never felt like too much, and I constantly hungered to find out more about the world.

I talked about this after reading Infomocracy for SFFBookClub, but I really appreciated how much flying cars in this story drove so many social changes. If people can be flown across the globe in a few hours, then borders lose meaning. And if borders lose meaning, then what does that mean for governments that are based on geography. Clearly, the hive system is not meant to be posited as some ideal government solution, but for me at least there's something idealistic and positive about the idea of people being able to (more) freely choose their own laws and government in ways that aren't constrained by the power of geography.

I enjoyed the rest of the series as well, but I feel like the first two books are by far the strongest for me as a reader. The final two books are no longer an edited history and so Mycroft becomes even more of an unreliable narrator (if such a thing is possible) and the fourth book goes off on some epic :drum: diversions. I enjoyed the final two books a lot (and the ending lands SO well) but in some ways it wanders much more philosophically and is not as tight of a story as the first two books for me.

Unsurprisingly, I have a bunch of gender thoughts on this book too, which I'm going to put separately, because there's a lot of them: books.theunseen.city/user/picklish/status/87074

This is the sequel to Children of Memory. It's got some similar set up to the first book, in that it's got a dual perspective (historical development of Nod and Damascus, and then current time trip there with characters from the first book) and it's got some uplifted non-human creatures (octopuses!!). However, I think this book also has a huge new horror element to it that the first book didn't have that it pulls off very successfully and creepily.

This book suffers a little bit from second book syndrome in that the first book felt much more tightly crafted and the ending resonated in a satisfyingly foreshadowed way. Book two is doing a few too many similar things, and it doesn't quite all come together in the same way. I think for a book two of a (presumed?) trilogy, I was hoping for more indication of some larger planned arc plot tying these books together, and without that this book feels more like a serial than part of a larger work.

Probably my biggest disappointment was really that most of the characters in book two felt very flat to me. I don't think the characterization in book one was particularly strong, but I did enjoy seeing various humans change through time as well as getting a window on different Portiid individuals as well. In this book, Senkovi certainly is a stand-out here as a wry scientist. The part I did really enjoy about the characters was in the spider/human relations. Fabian and Meshner supporting each other and Meshner understanding Fabian's social standing and Meshner having a good backstory for why he was interested in Fabian's research. Helena realizing that her peer relationship with Portia has a lot more of a unstated power and social dynamic than she thought previously.

I do really like the octopus psychology brought in here, in terms of reflecting the fact that an octopus's brain is split across its tentacles; that it imagines wanting something and then its tentacle brains just make it happen and appear. As with book one, I wish these octopuses also had real names that were not just repeated across multiple characters. This book tries to write in some reasoning for why this is happening here, but it still doesn't work for me as a reader, sorry. Given the fluid nature :drum: of octopus society too, I felt like the brief windows into octopus life were also not as effective for me as they were with the Portiids.

I have a few spoiler-y ending thoughts, which I'll leave in a separate comment.

This short story can be read here: www.fantasy-magazine.com/fm/fiction/slow-communication/

This is a trans story (by a trans author). It's about a family where once a generation a mysterious leviathan will contact a woman in the family who will hear one question and give the answer to the previous generation's questions. The tension here is between Darla who feels pulled to change her appearance and self to be less of a woman and more male, and the connection to and exhortations of her family to not change in a way that will cause the leviathan to not recognize her and cause her to miss her chance.

I love this idea of a multigenerational slow conversation with a mysterious entity. However, I especially really like the positioning of transness not just with respect to normal gender expectations but also as a threat to connection to family and family history as well. The ending is also excellent.

I also really appreciated the author spotlight here: www.fantasy-magazine.com/fm/non-fiction/author-spotlights/author-spotlight-dominique-dickey/

This feels like the most "classic scifi" book that I have read in a long time. Spaceships! Evolution! Cold sleep! Ark ships from a ruined earth! Aliens! Consciousness upload! Space battles! I'm half-joking here, but rather than trite, it felt refreshing to read this more classic space opera story as a change of pace from my usual fare.

The story is told through two parallel perspectives, one following the historian Holsten Mason (a classicist of now-gone earth empires) on an ark ship and another following the historical development and intelligent evolution of spiders on a terraformed planet. Both perspectives are told over great swaths of time: pictures of important moments in spider history as they evolve, but also flashes of human experience as well between cold sleep as they try to survive with what's left of humanity. If anything, despite following the same major characters, the human narrative is just as disjoint as the spider historical one, as Holsten is continually woken up briefly to be forced into some (terrible) surprising development and then put back into cold sleep for years immediately after, in a psychologically devastating cycle.

The immediate comparison for me, especially one about intelligent spiders, is to think about Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. One thing I think Children of Time does very well is to consider what a spider psychology would be like, in terms of gender politics, social groups, communication, decision-making, conflict, etc. Spider technology develops in its own branching way and not along human paths or with human priorities. Having a picture of society throughout history as well helps to build this evolutionary social picture. A Deepness in the Sky's spiders in comparison felt ...much too human, in a lot of ways. In some ways, the storytelling there was at a disadvantage because the spider's perspective was mediated by Focused humans translating spider experiences into a more human one. However, I don't feel like the spider-ness came through as it did so strongly in this book.

(One small aside observation, is that I felt like the spider's Understandings and ways of knowing and remembering things about the world felt in some ways like a parallel to current day searchable internet knowledge. When information is easily accessible, it's no longer interesting or novel to just be able to know things, but more about being able to interconnect information from different disciplines or to learn knew things. On a related note, I would LOVE to hear about spider Understanding librarians. How do they organize this information and distribute it??)

In some ways, this is a reversal of a typical "uplift" narrative, where humans uplift some animals, but there's always a power dynamic of human superiority the whole time. One of the things that changes this dynamic in this book is that there's a reversal of humanity's fortunes very early on in the book. Things go very poorly on the human end of things: failing technology, no planets to settle on, intergroup squabbling, revolts, colonial attitudes, attempting genocide. The spider end of the story is generally one of social and technological growth, the successful overcoming of obstacles, and "humanization" to put it in a particular way. By the end, for me, it felt like it was intended for the reader to empathize more with the spiders than (most of) the humans, and I think this narrative framing makes the ending very satisfying.

One small quibble on my part (and this appears to continue into other books [not that I'm hypothetically halfway through book two right now]), is that I found it weird that all of the spiders retained the same names (Portia, Bianca, Fabian, and Viola) throughout each of the different perspectives throughout all of history, despite being different individuals in each story. In some ways, I can understand the parallel of telling one story of humans (the same ones, pulled across time via cold sleep) and one story of spiders (the same names, by convention). However, these spiders were not just archetypes and were different enough from each other, that I felt like it stripped some of their individuality, especially in comparison to the human side of the story.

I enjoyed this book a bunch and will read (am already reading) the sequels.

This book is the tale of Kai (a demon prince) who had been trapped with his witch friend Ziede, working to figure out who had trapped them and why, while also trying to rescue their missing friend Tahren. There's also a perspective of Kai from the past being trapped, freed, and working to fight against the Hierarchs.

I have some mixed feelings about this book. It certainly opens up very strongly and the characters, plot, and world grabbed me immediately. I am a sucker for a story with dual perspective, telling a story in the past as well as the present that echo each other. The worldbuilding ideas felt super fresh and I loved learning about the world, the politics, and the characters. However, I was disappointed by parts of the ending, felt overwhelmed by a lot of world detail for quite some time, and wished that there was a bit more character detail for anybody but Kai.

This book drops you squarely in the middle of worldbuilding detail (almost as much as Ninefox Gambit). Even by the end, I'm still not sure that I know what differentiates various magic types, what the Hierarchs are, or the different flavors of Immortal Blessed. I don't know that I need to know all of these things either, but it felt like I was left with a lot of holes in my knowledge.

Because of that, I hope that there is more than just this single book, because so much of it leaves me wanting. There's whole swaths of history that are not described in the past (e.g. Kai's grandmother) as well as between the past and present sections of the narrative. On top of that, it felt like there were some characters like Tenes and Sanja who didn't really get a lot of space on the page. It almost felt like the cast was too broad and so characters didn't get enough room to develop.

I certainly dig the gender stuff going on in the background. Kai is a demon who inhabits multiple bodies over time. There's also some snooty "oh these Arike folks have some binary gender hangups" in an epigraph before some of the chapters. There's some comments about mercenaries (normally women) being forced to present in ways that they normally wouldn't. This is all kind of in the background of the story, but mostly I just want to hear more about demon gender, thank you.

I think my biggest disappointment with the book is the method in which some of the plot lines are wrapped up. I'll leave those thoughts in a spoilerly comment separately.

Despite some negative feelings above, overall I really enjoyed this and it makes me want to go back and reread the Raksura books again.

The shtick of this book is that Peter and Maria have an awkward one night stand, but then end up awkwardly starring with each other for six years acting as slow burn lovers stuck on an island on a hit TV show. This was a fun read overall; I think I enjoyed Maria being extremely self-aware as to her own needs for happiness, and her need to have and create community wherever she goes.

This book also amps up the silliness from previous books. There's Dolphy McBlowholeface the local dolphin, Swedish poop humor, a running gag about jars of pickled herring on hand at all times, and a fear of cows. Not that I need my romance novels to be srs bsns at all times, but I think this humor style (or quantity thereof?) didn't quite land for me.

One thing I have enjoyed about the whole series is all of the cast interactions with each other, and so in particular I really enjoyed the epilogue of this book, where the whole cast gets together to watch the finale air together. It hits home in a very "Mass Effect Citadel DLC party" way, where I feel like seeing all the characters interact together felt like a more satisfying send-off than even the end of the romance story proper.

I enjoyed this followup book to Spoiler Alert featuring some of the side characters as main characters. They're VERY different people than Marcus and April, with Alex being a giant ball of energy (and overly excited about fanfic tropes) and Lauren having some delightful quiet snark. I continue to enjoy how much all of the characters in these books are their own individuals with their own personal growth; even if this is a romance book and so it's necessarily about two folks coming together, they still continue to have their own independent needs and lives.

I think this could just be a me thing, but I think one offputting thing to me is the way that Alex is a continual insult train about Lauren's height. Given how much Lauren puts up with other people making comments about her appearance (and given that her biggest obstacle is learning to value and stand up for herself), this really struck me as a weird interaction. I know that constant teasing is a way that some folks interact with each other, but this felt too insult-y for my own comfort.

If anything, I am glad to have read this book for the idea of BIG HARPY ENERGY. I certainly can use the reminder to take up more space, value myself, and care less about what other people think of me.

This was a fun conclusion to this trilogy.

I think ultimately, this is a book driven by the principal point of view characters and their actions. Despite that many of them are leaders of empires, islands, or organizations, this fantasy series is less about political maneuvering and more about interpersonal conflicts and shifts. This made a lot of sense in book one, following three or four different characters in different places, none of whom were in real positions of power. However, I think I was a little surprised at how much this style continued through the whole series.

In some ways there's some superhero vibes, where the sides are determined by which heroes are opposing or supporting whom at any moment. I said this about book two, but I appreciated the ongoing shifting allegiances. Characters join up, and then split apart and join opposite sides. Some are forced to be on sides they don't want. Some help each other only reluctantly. I think it works really well and creates some good character growth moments.

In the end, I still feel a little like some of the magical world-building details got handwaved through more than I wanted. I'm still not sure I really understand the underlying reason why islands are sinking. I understand what actions make them sink, but not why. (Maybe I don't understand what makes them float in the first place?? ) I feel like the memory pools also felt a little too convenient, and I wish this were better foreshadowed or explained. There's some "I hope you don't find out what this magical artifact really does", but then that detail is never revealed. The book also itself asks (but does not answer) what the connection is between all the things that bone shard magic can be used on.

I'm not trying to nitpick details here and I certainly don't need some intricately built magic system in a book, but it just didn't all quite hang together for me in a way that I wanted.

I'm continuing my reread of this series before I get to the new final book in the trilogy. This book has Lin getting square into politics, avoiding assassination attempts, and trying to wrangle all of the islands and stepping into more mysteries that her father has left her. The climax of the book manages to believably get ~all of the major characters together into the same place for a final battle with some murky sides and shifting loyalties. I definitely appreciated the slow dribble of lore and backstory through journal translations; we learn a lot more about the Sukais, the empire, and the Alanga and I am here for all of it.

That said, I forgot just how uncomfortable this book was for me to read. I think it mostly revolves around the way Jovis is being pulled in multiple directions. I think it's one thing for the first book to have Jovis trying to leave the Ioph Carn smugglers (he just wants to leave, they feel betrayed) and being pursued by them while he tries to chase down Emahla. This is fine to me, maybe because he's clear about what he wants and up front about what he's about the whole time, and maybe it's because the book does a good job of writing the Ioph Carn as the creepy smuggling mafia that it's acceptable to spurn.

However, the first book ends with Jovis in a very new position and sworn loyalties, while simultaneously still being in contact with the Shardless Few and also dangerously getting reinvolved with the Ioph Carn. As always, it's not clear to him what the right thing is to do, and so he tries to play it every way. Maybe it's just my own personal discomfort with "lying to people you care about" and "not talking to people you (should?) trust" as narrative tension. Or, maybe it's just super effective on me grimacing emoji.

The third book in this trilogy came out last month so I took the time to comfort reread the first two books before I read the third one for the first time.

Overall, this book was super enjoyable even on a reread. It has four point of view characters, but each of them had their own unique intrigue and appeal. Unlike some other fantasy series, I never felt impatience to "get back to the good character". There's Lin the secretive emperor's amnesiac daughter, in competition with her foster brother to be heir, trying to learn bone shard magic. There's Sand who lives in a haze on a thinly inhabited island who suddenly regains her memories of other places. There's Phalue the daughter of a corrupt governer, who is trying to woo somebody who challenges her liberal "just world" beliefs. Finally, there's Jovis, a navigator turned smuggler, who tried to get out of the smuggling game to chase after his stolen childhood sweetheart, who meets a strange creature and gets increasingly suckered into helping people.

The world-building overall is a lot of fun. I enjoyed the bone shard magic idea a lot, where people inscribe (human) bones with commands on them and combine these shards (into dead animals) to form animated constructs. Big magical programming vibes. The flip side of this system is that these bones come from living humans to power these constructs, and requires all children to "tithe" parts of their skull. When the bones are in use, it drains the health of those people and causes them to waste away. It's a really neat way to think about "magical externalities" and especially who bears them.