Good ol’ fashioned space opera. Told from the point of view of a former ship commander of a space exploration force now residing on the to-her alien planet where her new husband is a retired military officer and high-ranking nobleman’s son – she is pregnant and said husband has just been appointed regent for the …
YA. Set in a city in a world very much like our own. Except the city – no mention is made of broader polities of any sort – is a couple of decades past a revolution. And that revolution seems to have been based on prison abolitionist and transformative justice principles, though such terms are …
Literary and fantastical. Stories from the history of an empire that never was. Slow, vaguely dream-like, in quite a distinctive voice. Very much told in the form of storytelling, in the sense that it is as if they are being told orally by storytellers. Not high fantasy, which you might stereotypically expect when the words …
YA contemporary. The book’s protagonist – who is Black, queer, and trans – is navigating all the stress and drama of adolescence at an arts-focused high school in Manhattan that his dad can hardly afford when an anonymous someone plasters pre-transition images hacked from his phone (accompanied by his deadname) all over the foyer of …
Literary fiction. I really like Brand’s writing but, for whatever reason, it has been quite a few years since I last read any, so I was very happy to sink my teeth into this one. The narrator describes three love affairs that take place as she attempts to finish her doctoral dissertation. As someone who …
Science fiction and fantasy, all at once. As a cover blurb from a prominent genre author puts it, “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!” Which on the one hand neatly captures some of the book’s key elements, but on the other hand doesn’t really capture its essence. I of course went into …
Historical fiction with a dash of the fantasical. Set in the New York underworld of the ’30s and ’40s. Begins from the perspective of a light-skinned Black woman passing as white who has for years been working for a Manhattan mob boss as a killer. In doing so, she is making use of her version …
Short stories. Literary. Weird. Translated from Japanese. Many of the stories feature some ordinary complaint in the life of an ordinary woman – to do with work, to do with a relationship, or something else – that is intertwined with some aspect of the world behaving in some manner that is different than we would …
Hardboiled detective fiction meets secret wizarding school fiction. A hard-drinking, mediocre, non-magical PI gets hired to solve a murder at the school for teens who can do magic where her estranged and very much magical twin sister is on staff. The mystery is pretty good, but I think the book is really more about the …
YA contemporary at heart, though it dabbles a bit in fantasy, mystery, and fairy tale. A tiny island off the east coast of a continent that is implied but not stated to be North America, an island known only for a rare bird that nests there in the summer and that draws a small but …