A glorious mess of a book that started a bit rough for me (I found the dialogue very unnatural and character motivation/growth unrealistic), but soon I could not stop reading and was 100% invested in the characters. Nessie is Nigerian-American, fat, and queer. She's out and proud...except to her parents, who don't even know she's rather be an actor than a lawyer. Enter Chance who witnesses her downfall opening night. Chance oozes rich white male privilege but is just as broken as the rest of the characters. This is both a hot mess of a book (mainly because the characters were hot messes and made less than stellar choices) and a compelling testament of deeply flawed people persevering to try and find their own happiness in the world. Some even find it. Hopefully the rest do in the next book of the series.

I found this story very cliched, full of tropes, and the love story shallow. There's a maddening amount of backstory that is never fully realized - maddening because it's all actually really interesting, and I would have loved to have learned more about the Empire and the politics of psychic power, and instead we get pulled back into a love story that I never really bought, from two of the most contrary characters ever who cannot communicate to save their lives.

It also needed a few runs from a continuity and tech editor. There was one scene with the MMC's clothing changing mid-scene. The book started out with shifting POVs and then moved to omnipotent POV. And lots of typos throughout.

A wild and crazy ride, looking at fandom, reality vs. expectation, and being your authentic self. It's more than a little over the top at times, but thoroughly enjoyable.

I have never seen a Thumbelina retelling before, so I was very intrigued. And this short novella sure packs a lot into the story. The setting is a human colony on Venus, where the inhabitants have basically bought into indentured servitude for a large corporation to terraform the planet as Earth is becoming uninhabitable due to climate change and other environmental degradation. Two unnamed colonists desperately want a child but keep miscarrying. So the woman's non-binary partner picks a tulip (illegally) to bring to their wife. Inside is Bloemetje (which means "bouquet" in Dutch), our Thumbelina. There's a lot here about colonization, corporate control, identity, and self-determination. I enjoyed it, but also felt the need for just a little bit more. There's a very fable-esque quality to Bloemetje, which both worked but also served to disconnect the reader from the story. There were also some strange references to "God's will" which seemed out of place, and threw me out of the reading.

An engrossing collection of shorts, and while many might be considered horror or dark fantasy, they are all an exploration of humanity through a veneer of Filipino culture, folklore, and mythical monsters. These stories embrace the weird and the dark, but also have a glimmer of hope and celebrate human resilience. I've read many of these stories already, but it was a pleasure revisiting them again, and finding new ones. Highly recommended.

This was utterly delightful. If you ever wondered about the lives of the shopkeepers in the high fantasy adventuring games, wonder no more. Ashwick creates a wonderful world featuring the shopkeepers of Rosemond Street, who cater to the adventuring parties trying their luck deep in the caves where their town is built, or farther afield. Ambrose runs the potion shop, and Eli opens up another potion shop directly across the street.

This is a cozy queer romance, enemies to friends to lovers, found family, high fantasy tale that I absolutely fell into. I loved the characters, who were very flawed, the absurd circumstances that have them forced to work together, and the sweet family of Rosemond Street who all look out for each other. I highly enjoyed this.

I found this book extremely well-written, but I never really connected with it except on a very superficial level. Janie, the narrator, was very sympathetic but not very empathetic. She was very... flat. Her emotions and motivations never shone through the story. Hannah, her sister, was this great mysterious void, but once she showed up in the plot again shrank into the background.

Throughout the book, I wanted more. More emotion, more background, more explanation, more exposition. For a first person narrative, I didn't find out too much about Janie as a person, especially since this is a coming of age story of sorts, despite Janie already being an adult. She had allowed herself to be subsumed by her parents' expectations for her, and in the story she slowly begins to exert her own own authority over her life. At the same time, Hannah had the opposite journey where she had completely renounced her parents and then started coming back to them.

This was a theme that I wish had been explored more, rather than the soap opera reasons for the two sisters to pull away from each other and from their parents (physically for one, and emotionally for the other). Instead, the story focused on Janie's relationship with her father in a meandering and not always satisfying fashion.

Review copy courtesy of the publisher via LibraryThing's Early Reviewer Program

This is a very cute little story, and I wish it was longer. It felt like the first part of an awesome kid's book (it definitely had a kid feeling, despite some cussing). Lots of potential for some truly awesome world building, story telling, and adventuring inside storybook settings.

This was a slow build urban fantasy that had elements that intrigued me, but ultimately I DNFed because the slow build was too slow. There was a lot of jumping around to different characters, with lots of minutia that were not plot relevant.

A dark and grim novella about a fantasy world that is built on the bones of dead gods. In the middle of a horrific plague, a soldier finds a murdered baby boy stuffed into the coffin of a plague victim, and begins a quest to find the killer. The language took a little getting used to but I quickly fell into the story, and the weird cadences of the sentences fit the earthy tone of the book. The story was twisty and brutal, and ultimately satisfying even if it was not a happy one.

What an odd story. I wasn't sure exactly what I was expecting when I first started reading this, but what I found sure wasn't it. The story is deceptively simple, but extremely haunting at the same time. I normally wish short stories are longer, more fleshed out, but this one seemed just right. The pace and episodic nature reflected Maggie's dreams. I liked it.

I tried really hard to get into this book. The premise sounded interesting, and I was determined to get through it. Unfortunately, I finally had to admit defeat. I found the book incredibly shallow, and a bore. The relentless name-dropping got old really quick, and got in the way of what little plot there was.

DNF

I was a bit hesitant about this book because I after I received it, I realized I had read another by the author and, while I liked it, did not find it very memorable. Thankfully, I got over my hesitation and read the book... and kept reading... and reading. I loved this.

The main character, Lily, drowns herself in work and probably would have continued doing so if she hadn't found the picture of her husband's secret family in Italy. So she goes over there to confront him, and in the process falls into the machinations of the Secret League of Widowed Darners -- the old women of the village who have taken it upon themselves to mend hearts instead of socks.

I got swept up in Lily's story, and her quest for understanding, and the widows' mishaps and misunderstandings. And I really wanted to taste the amorucci.

The Gulf oil spill is one of those events that people erroneously assume is completely fixed, but only time will show the full extent of how the spill will impact the Gulf ecosystem, and the lives of those communities that rely on the Gulf for their livelihoods. But what Jacobson shows is that humans have been impacting the Gulf long before the BP spill in its quest to maintain the status quo of development, beginning with the Army Corps misguided stabilization of the Mississippi River.

Perhaps the entire book could be summed up with this one line: "...we need to remind ourselves that natural systems are much more finely tuned than we think, and if we like the way they currently work, then we should try very, very hard to not screw with them."

Jacobson intersperses his own experiences in the Gulf, both during and after the oil spill with chapters on the history, ecology, and culture of the Gulf, and a few chapters detailing the Deepwater Horizon explosion and its aftermath. Doing so really gives a good sense life along the Gulf and how much has already changed through the decades, and made me think depressingly of how much will continue to change, given the spill.

I couldn't help comparing the premise to the TV show Medium because I have been marathon-watching that on Netflix. But other than the main character seeing dead people every so often, there really wasn't much else similar. Which was a good thing. This book was fast, amusing, and at times almost-but-not-quite over-the-top.

I really liked Brenda, the reluctant crime-solving medium, who would probably act very much like I would have if I had to throw my hat in with a mischievous vengeance demon. Brian is a goofball, who is the catalyst for most of the almost over-the-top moments, whose comedic antics mask an tragic event in his past that is hinted at but never fully explored.

A really promising start to what I hope will turn into an ongoing series.

There is a distinct lack of personal stories of Tibetan refugees, and with the population aging and dying off, it is vital that Yangzom took the time to document her grandmother's and mother's stories in this remarkable book. I will admit that I don't know much about Tibet and the Chinese invasion and occupation, other than the basics. I also don't know much about Tibetan culture and it's unique form of Buddhism, again, other than the basics.

Brauen takes pains to not only tell her family's story, but to explain to the reader Tibetan culture, beliefs, and societal structure. She spent the majority of the book on her grandmother and mother's story, focusing on their life in Tibet, their escape and subsequent life in India, and then in Switzerland. The writing was simplistic, but the story swept me away.

China has written the story of Tibet within its borders as one of liberation and progress, a jingoist picture that I think most outside of China know is false, but it is important that stories such as Across Many Mountains continue to be told, to counteract the Chinese re-interpretation of history. While reading, I came across a few lines in the book that made me pause and reach for a pen to underline it. "I think we have to find a solution that enables the Tibetans and Chinese to live together in such a way that both groups are guaranteed their respective rights and freedoms. Part of this must be a change in the Chinese attitude toward Tibet. The Chinese people know far too show more little about our culture and history, having for decades been fed a constant diet of misinformation and propaganda." This is key, but will be near impossible in a society as tightly controlled as China, where the government restricts access to information and has proven most adept at brainwashing the current generation of young people, who do not remember Tienanmen Square.

I applaud Brauen and her family for this book, and hope that it can influence some change. Either way, it is an important story that needs to be told. show less

I am not quite sure what I was expecting with this book, but I know it wasn't what the book actually was. It was an extremely quick read, and very dependent on your geek pop culture knowledge (which I discovered was lacking). It was fluffy though, and a bit less philosophical and more quick musings on the potential deeper meaning of certain lines from what the authors considered cult classics of geek culture.

Cute enough but I always find these sort of books unsatisfying, when what I really wanted was less a walk down the aisle of a candy store and more Tao of Pooh introspection. I do have a list of new books and movies to check out though.

The first thing I noticed about this book was the unique physical structure of it. Rather than the traditional bound book, it was an accordion, with Evelyn's story on one side, and Brendan's on the other. It made for a bit unwieldy reading but it perfectly conveyed that the stories were two sides of the same piece.

The story is a simple and short one: boy meets girl. But there is an undertone of something fantastical which the reader is never quite sure is real or not - but does it really matter?

I started with Evelyn's story, and then continued on with Brendan, which introduced the fantastical earlier. I wish I could erase my memory and start again with Brendan and then Evelyn, because I think it might give just a different experience. Each story fills in gaps of the other and reveals some things that make the other perspective make sense.

The story ends before you find out if the two characters will ultimately end up together. The scene is ripe for them to do so, but it would be still a satisfying ending if they were not.

I was very impressed with how deftly Leveen told the story of Mary Bowser and Bet Van Lew, given just how little is known about them, particularly Mary. I love history, and I especially love the history of people, things, and events that tend to be marginalized in traditional school classrooms. I had never knew of either of these two women's existence, and I wish they were at least mentioned in my school textbooks because they are amazing.

Leveen focuses on Mary Bowser, who was born a slave to the Van Lew family in Richmond, and is freed by Bet Van Lew following Bet's father's death. Bet sends Mary to be educated in Philadelphia. On the advent of the Civil War, Mary returns to Richmond and takes up spying for the Union, and even secures a position as a house slave in the home of Jefferson Davis.

Leveen does take some artistic license with history, giving Mary a much larger role in the plotting and planning than most historians are wont to do. I found the entire book fascinating, and loved Mary's slow initiation into the abolitionist world, starting at sewing circles to eventually something more dangerous and drastic.

Hopefully this book will inspire more people to learn about the incredible role Mary and Bet played in the Civil War.

I should preface this review by stating short stories have to be pretty spectacular for me to really like them. So maybe I was just the wrong audience for a short story anthology - but on the other hand, I am the perfect audience because I love fairy tale retellings.

I had two main problems with this anthology: 1) the caliber of the stories, and 2) the disjointed nature of the book. There were a few stories I did enjoy while reading them, but overall none were very memorable. I honestly can't remember some of the stories from the beginning of the book.

All the stories in this book are billed as retellings of familiar tales. Which is true, yes, but which tales? The titles make me think fairy tales. So why then is there a full section that contained elements of Greek myths? And the random story about Nimue? Or the Bluebeard story that made me go WTF? Or the entire last section of the anthology which seemed like it was cobbled together to hold the three stories which really had no commonalities?

In addition to the common theme of the anthology not holding true, the feel of the different stories also varied to the point where they honestly shouldn't have been included in the same collection. There were tongue-in-cheek stories side-by-side with depressing and serious stories.

An okay collection, but there are much better anthologies of fairy tale retellings out there.

There are a number of things that are wrong with this book, but I'll get to those in a bit. Admittedly, Locke created a very interesting world - it's politically fraught where the aristocrats are vampires (including Queen Victoria, about to celebrate her 175th year of rule) and werewolves, and their half-blood children serve as their protectors. Xandra is a halvie serving on the Royal Guard. While investigating her sister's disappearance and later death, she discovers that her world is more complicated and dangerous than she believed it to be.

First, I did enjoy the book. It's a quick read, and a fun one. The plot moves along briskly and the world-building was extremely interesting.

There are a few things that kept throwing me out of the book, though. The first was that the writing seemed amateurish at points, which is weird considering that Locke has published a number of other books under different names. But the words "chocolatey goodness" should never appear on the pages of a professionally published book. The author also tried a little too hard to make the book seem English - using "kerb" and "colour", for example. Xandra also throws in the odd "Oy". The book's setting is the Britain that Americans believe to be Britain.

Also, I got the feeling the author wrote this to piggyback onto the steampunk craze, even though this book contained very little actual steampunk (actually, pretty much nothing - there were no steam engines). Steampunk is more than corsets and tiny show more hats. And it pisses me off when things are labeled "steampunk" when it's obviously just a ploy to get people to buy it because steampunk is the 'in' thing right now.

The plot was interesting, and I did consider reading the next one but the awful shallowness and marketing around this book just turned me off. show less

It has been almost five years since Big Boned came out, and I was really excited to revisit Heather Wells. I loved the first two books, was a bit meh on the third, but overall had very fond memories of the teen pop star turned residence hall assistant director who solved murders in her spare time.

All the things that annoyed me about the third book were gone in this one, and Cabot took all the good from the previous books and, if possible, made them even better.

The best thing about about the book is the focus on the characters who were just bystanders in the earlier books. Jordan and Tania are fleshed out and become real people, and we see more of the Cartwright clan than just the two brothers.

And, the book is just plain fun, which is what I expect from a Heather Wells book. I hope this isn't the last we see of her.