Check out the end for free books and special offers from indie authors.
Join the newsletter to get a free short story, news, and updates on my work and releases.
Fang Fiction
Kate Stayman-London
Fantasy, Semi-Urban, Romance
2024
Prose Novel, Adult
From Storygraph:
“Tess Rosenbloom is no stranger to the dark. A grad school dropout and chronic insomniac, she spends her nights managing a chic Brooklyn hotel and her days curled up with her favorite vampire novels, Blood Feud.….
Until one walks through her door.
It turns out Blood Feud is real, and the sexy villain of the novels is trapped. Eager to escape her life, Tess agrees to help rescue him, and soon she’s in a fantasia of lavish palaces and enchanted forests…and against her better judgment, she’s falling in love with one of them. (And unbeknownst to Tess, her estranged best friend is having a sapphic affair with a beautiful vampire of her own back in New York.)
Visiting the world of your favorite story is any fan’s dream, but will Tess be able to outrun the demons of her past (and vampires of her present) before it becomes a nightmare?”
This is one of those books that I liked, but the fact that I was a little disappointed is sort of my own fault.
This is a solid rom-com with some heavier real-world elements. This is a really good fantasy romance for someone who wants something low-spice, and it has a good balance of straight-forward urban fantasy, more fantastical fantasy, and grounded story-telling. It throws in some fun e-mails, chatlogs, and podcast transcripts to supplement the more “traditional” text. It’s not trying to set up a big fantasy epic, just a flash-in-the-pan romantic adventure, and it does that extremely well.
What I wanted was a much more complex conversation about the relationship between fandom, media, and our meta-relationship with fictional characters. Particularly how it affects our interactions with real-life people and processing trauma. The book didn’t…not…do that…I just had the impression from the marketing and packaging of the book that it would go a little deeper with more nuance in those areas. It just didn’t, but it’s not the book’s fault. The book itself didn’t set up that expectation then not deliver on it. I’m not even sure I could nail down where I gleaned that expectation from.
Book marketing is weird.
The Invasion, The Visitor (Animorphs #1-2)
K.A. Applegate
Sci-fi, Body Horror
1996
Audiobook, Middle Grade
They have at least up to book ten on audiobook for free on Spotify. Do I love that it’s on Spotify? Not really. Do I love the accesibility of it? Yes. I wish there was a better middle ground.
I loved the show as a kid and got up to The Hork-Bajir Chronicles in the books (so somewhere in the 20s). This would have been the late 90s, and I’ve been thinking about rereading them for maybe a decade, now, but never could seem to find the time. Then I ran out of podcast episodes. Audiobooks, something I normally struggle with, were the perfect fill-in. And these are fantastic audiobooks.
I cried at the end of book one when…that…happens to Tobias. I had forgotten it happened so early in the series, and I wasn’t prepared.”
Someone You Can Build a Nest In
John Wiswell
Fantasy, Body Horror, Sapphic Romance
2024
Prose Novel, Adult
From Storygraph:
“Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she’s fallen in love.
Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals…
However, the hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she’s found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, she realizes humans don’t think about love that way.
…
And the bigger challenge remains: surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to learn to build a life with, rather than in, the love of her life.”
This is such a good book. It’s sort of comfortable body horror that also mixes feelings of dysphoria into it. A compelling villain in Homily’s family that feels both bombastically outlandish but also achingly real in their narcissism. Shesheshen and Homily are in this sort of comparative dance as imperfect victims of trauma and abuse and how they differ in their reactions to it. They’re both suffering under the burdens of these filial attachments, and it all blows up around them.
The final “part” of the book (parts broken up into chapters) does feel like it drags the speed of the rest of the book down. It’s such a charming and weird part of the story though, that shores up a lot of the dangling themes around family.
As an asexual person myself, I also appreciate the very non-sexual elements of their romance. Their initial discomfort with physical affection complements their individual relationship with their own bodies. And I may be a monster-fucker at heart, but it’s also nice when they’re not actually into that.
The Word for World is Forest (Hainish Cycle)
Ursula K. LeGuin
Sci-fi
1972
Prose Novel, Adult, reread
From Storygraph:
“Terran colonists take over the planet locals call Athshe, meaning “forest,” rather than “dirt,” like their home planet Terra. They follow the 19th century model of colonization: felling trees, planting farms, digging mines & enslaving indigenous peoples. The natives are unequipped to comprehend this. They’re a subsistence race who rely on the forests & have no cultural precedent for tyranny, slavery or war. The invaders take their land without resistance until one fatal act sets rebellion in motion & changes the people of both worlds forever.“
Reading the Hainish cycle gives you different experiences depending on what order you read it: chronological, publication, or scattershot. This book released before The Dispossessed but takes place after it, for example. I’ve always sort of liked the scattershot approach because honestly…she’ll tell you what you need to know.
And that technique definitely emerges with this book in a kind of fun way.
This was actually my first Hainish book waaaaaay back when I was a pre-teen in the early 00’s, and I basically remembered nothing of the actual plot. I have some vague recollections of my first impressions. There’s a bit toward the middle where they dump a fair bit of Hainish lore on you, but it’s pretty straight-forward. This is one of the books that’s a little more detached from the overall Hainish macro-lore. So as a teenager, I don’t recall having a hard time following.
Rereading it now, I spent the first half of the book thinking, “huh, there hasn’t been one mention of the ansible. That’s odd.” Then the book reveals where it takes place in the timeline, and they’re just now rolling out the ansible.
That was a sort of fun bit of small self-reflection on how my relationship with the book has changed.
The not-so-fun self-reflection was “someone should have been monitoring my reading more closely at that age.”
This is not a new thought. In those in-between years I did a very quick transition from middle grade to “general audience” books (think Lord of the Rings, Gulliver’s Travels, Watership Down, Color of Magic). My first Metamorphosis read was in there somewhere. However, I also read It (sewer scene and all) in seventh grade and no one stopped me.
So I think about this book with that hindsight, and I find myself trying to imagine under what context I would allow or reccomend this book for an eleven year old.
It has an accessible Lexile score. It’s not overly complicated plot-wise. There’s no gore. There’s violence and sexual violence, but a very abstract way.
At the same time, it’s a very heavy book at an existential level, particularly for something so short. The conversations it’s having about colonialism, misogyny, ecological destruction, and anti-intellectualism really need some more-than-basic knowledge of the commiserate real-world socio-political conflicts for them to hit at the level that I think the text deserves. There’s even a flash of acknowledgment of “white feminist privilege” that only really stands out in the context of third-wave, inter-sectional feminism. Something the LeGuin herself wouldn’t have had access to at the time.
So there’s no way that I really understood this book as a tween during the highest peak of post 9/11 hyper-nationalism. But knowing what I do, now, it has me thinking how I could position this book for my own kid so they get the most out of it when they read it the first time. They’re only an embryo, right now, so I’ve got some time.
Galaxy: The Prettiest Star
Jadzia Axelrod (W), Jess Taylor (I)
Sci-fi, Superhero
2022
Graphic Novel, Young Adult, Sapphic, LGBTQIA+
From Storygraph:
“Taylor Barzelay has the perfect life. Good looks, good grades, a starting position on the basketball team, a loving family, even an adorable corgi. Every day in Taylor’s life is perfect. And every day is torture.
Taylor is actually the Galaxy Crowned, an alien princess from the planet Cyandii, and one of the few survivors of an intergalactic war. For six long, painful years, Taylor has accepted her duty to remain in hiding as a boy on Earth.
That all changes when Taylor meets Metropolis girl Katherine “call me Kat” Silverberg, whose confidence is electrifying. Suddenly, Taylor no longer wants to hide, even if exposing her true identity could attract her greatest enemies.”
LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE this book. Most specifically, I love it’s approach the narrative of gender transition, gender non-conformity, and existential transness. If you look at the typical trans allegory (say The Matrix or even The Little Mermaid) you see this typical A to B movement of
1-unsettled existence
2-creating a new identity/learning the truth
3-come to a new understanding of self
4-happily ever after
What Prettiest Star does is establishes that Taylor existed in a native form that she was comfortable in. She was then forced to adhere to a new form by an outside force. So becoming her first form again is a reclamation, not a transformation. It acknowledges that for many trans people, it’s not about becoming something new, it’s about becoming the true self that was already there. That’s a much closer mirror to my non-binary experience.
This is a great, hear-wrenching read that doesn’t shy away from the more realistic “bad-ending” of the actual trans experience for so many people. The follow-up comes out in May (my copy is already ordered), so this is great time to read it.
Comic Back Catalog
Spider-Man: The Other
Because Spider-Man: Brand New Day is clearly going to pull from this cross-book storyline, I wanted to read it in full.
I don’t know, y’all. The mystic part of the Spider-Man lore has always felt counter-intuitive to the “anyone can wear the mask” ethos. The central conflict is that Peter is dying. Only we all know they’re not going to actually kill Spider-Man, so the mystery of the story is, instead, “what’s going to bring Peter back to life.” That’s the thing you’re waiting for the story to unfold for you. So in that aspect it’s compelling. “Oh, what’s going to happen? What new power is he going to get?” It’s not a bad story, by any means, it’s just sort of odd in the grand scheme of everything else.
It does show, though, that you can have Peter married, living with the Avengers, and “out” to Aunt May, and there’s still plenty of room for other conflicts.
We’ll see if/how the movie plays it out.
Deadpool
My next little comic reading “project” has been reading mainline Deadpool starting from Circle Chase by Nicieza. I’ve read Cable and Deadpool, Spider-Man/Deadpool, a few other small series, and I’m caught up on mainline since Wong. So I wanted to just fill in from the start. I’m midway through the Daniel Way run.
The Kelly era is, obviously, solid storytelling. That’s sort of a well-known element. Even in terms of nineties humor, it’s not the most grievous offender looking back on it this many years later. As it moves through Priest and Palmiotti you kind of get the feeling that they didn’t know how many issues they were going to be allowed to have, so they never really got a chance to establish the same level of through-line that Kelly did. Things feel a little more scattershot. Tieri seems like he knew he was getting four issues at a time. The Agent of Weapon X and Funeral for a Freak arcs are a lot more cohesive. They’re also very very Tieri. The tone and humor gets a lot darker, the humor a little sparser, and they do Copycat dirty.
As we get into Gail Simone, I feel like she creates a really great bridge into a more modern version of Kelly’s humor. It pulls from that ethos while popping up the “wacky” just a little. Just enough to float the storyline out of the grimness of some of the previous issues. But it also seems like she didn’t have quite enough time to set everything up for Agent X.
Agent X is really good. So so so good. It’s a bit of a shame that it was sort of under that Deadpool umbrella because it sort of restricted Alex/Nijo from being his own guy instead of just a narrative Deadpool stand-in. It’s a real bummer that’s he’s gotten such little screen-time since Cable & Deadpool.
The Daniel Way run starts right after Secret Invasion, and I feel like he, as a writer, gets shit on a lot in some of my comic reading circles. Obviously he has hits and misses like any writer. But I liked his Venom run (and wished he got a chance to finish it), and I’m generally enjoying his Deadpool run. I feel like he gets assigned characters when editorial doesn’t know what to do with them but feels like they have to do something. So he uses that freedom to do a bunch of weird stuff, and a lot of it ends up sticking when you sieve it out.
Like Hit-Monkey. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Hit-Monkey.
Spider-Man & the X-Men
You know that panel that’s like “But I don’t want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs!” That’s from this and it’s funny as hell in a super endearing way.
Free Books!
Check it Out!
Pixels and Pins Studio 