Dragons, but set it in the time of the Napoleonic wars, this was so fun. So, this is the beginning of a series and follows Captain Will Laurence and Temeraire as they prepare to defend England from invading French forces. Temeraire is born in the first part of the book and Laurence is a naval captain and not from England’s air defense, so we’re introduced to the world of fighting with dragons as they are. Temeraire is born from an egg that was captured from a French vessel with very little documentation, so he doesn’t even know what kind of dragon he is. So many different types are explored and explained as part of this search (we also get to meet them when Temeraire and Laurence are training and deployed.)
Temeraire is the best. My friend who recommended this book to me said that he has baby boy energy, and she was right. He’s without ego, curious, hardworking, and caring. I only want what is best for him and I love when that happens with a character. Because we learn about the dragon world as he does, I got caught up in his interest in his kind and the world. When he was angry at something, I was angry at something. When he did well, I was proud of him. This first installment ended with an answer to a question and some implied future danger, so I look forward to reading the next one. It was a lovely read.
So, if you like historical fiction with elements of fantasy, dragons, characters with baby boy energy, or any and all of the above, I really recommend this. It was a fun and touching adventure!
Vampires set in New Orleans in the 1870s. This should be fun. A friend from book club mailed this to me well over a year ago. I should definitely have already read it, but here we are.
This post contains spoilers for the entire Three-Body Problem series by Cixin Liu: The Three Body-Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End. So, tl;dr, if you like taking a long, dark look into the abyss and/or the human soul plus there are space ships, have at this series. If you like rocket ships and clear heroes and villains, and good triumphing over evil, this isn’t your series.
This book starts, of all places, at the Fall of Constantinople. It tells us the story of a prostitute who is able to assassinate even the most heavily guarded people. The end of her story is tragic, of course, but it serves as a fitting preamble to the rest of the book. The prostitute eventually fails because of a passing 4-D fragment in the solar system. We come back to the idea of multiple dimensions and moving between dimensions many times in this book.
So, like with the Dark Forest where we started back in the Crisis Era with the Wall Facer project, we do same with this book. While the Dark Forest followed Luo Ji as he figured out cosmic sociology and how to destroy other star systems, this book mostly follows Cheng Xin, a crisis-era scientist. She is just a regular person who happens to be a physicist when the Trisolaran plot is discovered. She is recruited by Planetary Intelligence. She puts forward an idea in a meeting that seems far-fetched. One way for us to get intelligence about the Trisolarans is to imbed a human in the Trisolaran fleet. This is exactly what her boss, Thomas Wade formerly of the CIA, wants. That’s not her crazy idea, though. Her crazy idea is to use all the nuclear bombs that we have lying around in precisely timed explosions to push a probe up to 1% of lightspeed. She is about to be laughed out of the room by the other scientists when Wade decides they should go for it. Onward, no matter the cost, as Wade likes to say. This becomes the staircase project and it ends up having profound effects on the fate of the whole solar system.
One of Cheng Xin’s friends from school, Yun Tianmeng has always had a bit of a crush on her and is dying of cancer. He unexpectedly receives a big wad of cash and, since he’s dying, he decides to spend it on an extravagant gift for Cheng Xin. He buys her a star, but he makes sure that she isn’t told who bought it for her. Then, he decides to end his own life. Before he can do that, though, Cheng Xin reappears and persuades him to stay alive long enough to become the spy they send to the Trisolarans.
Then we jump forward era to era to era, meeting characters we’ve met before and we follow a dance the Cheng Xin and Yun Tianmeng have with each other across literal centuries. Because of his gift of the star, Cheng Xin is put into a position again where she has tremendous power over the fate of humanity. This could go better, for her and for humanity. Because of decisions she makes, she is given two more chances to massively affect the fate of humanity. We meet Thomas Wade again as he tries to position himself to be a shot-caller. We meet Luo Ji again. There’s a complexity here that is interesting, and even though I said spoilers, I don’t want to be to spoiler-y. Thomas Wade comes off as a selfish-arrogant asshat, but for the whole of humanity, there is a definite argument to be made that he should be a shot-caller. Luo Ji seems pretty sympathetic to Cheng Xin and how love seems to be the principle that drives her, but he can also be a devastatingly effective critic. This book, like the ones before it, revisits over and over again the themes of humanity and love. What does it mean to be human? What will we do for those we love? What will we do to protect those we love? These are, as it turns out, not always fun and uplifting questions. Cheng Xin, Luo Ji, Yun Tianmeng, and the other characters in the book are repeatedly put into positions where there are no good choices and there is no way to stop the suffering. You just maybe get a little bit of say in the kind of suffering.
Another theme that comes up is arrogance. And how choices made in arrogance can way more destructive than choices made from ignorance or weakness. When we assume we’ve learned all we can learn from something, we might miss a detail that could save our lives. And, if you’re like me, you might end up yelling at an audiobook in your kitchen while you make dinner because someone decides, “We don’t know what that is. It’s probably unimportant.” But it is important. I’m still internally screaming.
These books were good, but they were dark. Like, I need some feel-good sci-fi after this. But I can’t wait for Beth to finish the series so we can talk about it. And I love a book that sticks with you. So, if you’re okay with dark, super-long delves into the heart of humanity on a very long timescale, then I recommend these. If you’re looking for a fun little jaunt into space, give this a pass.
I don’t often DNF a book. If I pick something up and make it past the first few pages, I’m usually in it for the long haul. I used to try to finish everything I picked up, but I abandoned that policy a while back. I do a lot of reading for work, so if I’m not enjoying the stuff I read outside of work, I don’t make myself finish it.
Well, it would have been a real slog to finish Barbarian Alien by Ruby Dixon. the tl;dr on this is that it was a lot of the same conversation over and over again in which a human woman clearly states what she wants and an alien man disregards it and is surprised when she doesn’t ‘behave’. 0/10, not even for the spicy bits. This one is not for me. Everything from here has spoilers for both Barbarian Alien and its predecessor Ice Planet Barbarians.
These books are notorious on booktok and in romance circles. They have some pretty massive consent issues and there is sexual assault in them (if no longer on the page, it is certainly implied). In the first book, the heroine Georgie wakes up in a spaceship following an abduction. She and the other women have been taken from their homes and are going god knows where. They are the spares, and they know this because they aren’t in special hibernation tanks. Their spaceship crashes on an inhospitable frozen planet and after rebelling against their captors, they have to find food or help or both. Georgie is up for the task. On the planet, she meets Vektal an alien who is big and strong and immediately in love with her. All the aliens in Vektal’s tribe have a parasite,a khui, that helps them survive on the frozen planet. The khui also tells them who their perfect mate is. Isn’t that sweet? It’s like imprinting from Twilight only instead of it being something magical, it is a parasite! Anyway, the first book was fine because Georgie was pretty awesome, we get introduced to some of the ecosystems and wildlife on the planet and, despite how shitty it was she had been kidnapped and then left on a frozen world with a poisonous atmosphere, Vektal was pretty good about boundaries and she got to make her own choices. All problems aside, it was fluffy alien romance with some spice in it. It certainly isn’t the first time a ‘perfect pairing’ or ‘soulmate’ or something similar has been used as a conceit (see the Twilight reference above. Or, The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf or this nightmare of a book Dark Guardian.)
Barbarian Alien follows a different woman who was kidnapped, Liz. It starts where the first book ends, with the women being rescued by the aliens. They are then taken on a hunt so that they, too, can get parasites and survive on the planet. I might be misremembering this from the end of the first book, because it has been a while since I picked it up, but I thought it had been decided that the women got to choose whether or not they were going to take the parasite or accept a quick death on the ice planet. Well, Liz, who is also pretty awesome, tries to back out of getting a parasite but Raahosh, an alien whose parasite has already let him know she’s his lady, can’t bear the thought of her dying without one, so he forces it on her. Then, because he knows he’s in the wrong! He kidnaps her away to a secret cave so she can’t tell people what he’s done. He reasons that once she’s pregnant, they’ll be sufficiently far enough along in the mating process that no one would dare try to separate them.
So, Liz is a bow hunter, but she’s super precious to Raahosh and she can’t possibly hunt, she might get hurt! So, he keeps her confined in his cave. And she keeps refusing his advances because of course she would. She also says, repeatedly, I don’t care what the parasite says, I get a choice. And I don’t choose this! But Vektal told the alien dudes that they had to respect the human mating rituals and this is all part of the fun human mating ritual, right?
So, our leading lady has been kidnapped by aliens, crash landed on a different alien planet, had a parasite forced on her because *soul mates* or whatever, has been kidnapped again and separated from all the other humans, and for reasons Raahosh speaks English, but he doesn’t tell her that, just listens to her talking to herself and wonders at how chatty she is. I mean, he doesn’t really listen or engage with what she says and when she finds out he speaks English his statements can be pretty much boiled down to, “We’re mated, why are you fighting the inevitable?”
Because she said no. She doesn’t want this. This book is not for me. But! silver lining! That means the third book is also not for me, so I can unhaul it! This annoys me, however, because my mom bought me these books because I asked for them. They’re in perfect condition. Ugh. That makes me sad.
So, those two books are headed to the unhaul pile. And I need a palette cleanser.
This is not the feel-good sci-fi I was looking for. But it was at the top of the TBR pile. Look at me! Reading books out of a literal TBR pile! I’m so proud.
I know I gushed about the previous book in this series, but I have come to gush about this one, too. Y’all, this was so cute!
This book begins more or less at the climax of The Queer Principles of Kitt Webb. So, a few spoilers ahead. The tl;dr is that this is a little spicy with light sub-dom vibes, with good character development, humor, and hijinks. If you’re looking for something light and fun with a happy ending, this is for you.
This book starts with the answers to some questions. First, Where was Rob during the robbery? And where did Marian go when she disappeared at the end of Kitt Webb? We begin with Marian, post-robbery, taking the duke home and then skedaddling. She doesn’t know if the duke will live, so she also doesn’t know if she’ll be blamed for her part in any of the crimes. So, she does the sensible thing. She collects her blackmailer from where she left him and runs off with him to the countryside to her father’s. Once they arrive, she finds her father’s dementia has worsened and that his landlord is an absolute scoundrel and a thief. Having just righted one wrong with the duke, she obviously can’t stand by and let Sir John Fanshawe get away with his thieving ways. For one, it is not economical. They agreed on a price and he has gone back on his agreement making the house unaffordable. For another, he has stolen are manuscripts she translated. How dare he raise the rent and also take her work and the original Greek writings on vellum. From the title, we might expect that this is the main part of the plot, but it’s really just a side piece. A majority of the novel is two prickly people not sure that they want companionship, marriage, family, or regular work, falling in love and realizing that they want each other and that they can figure out the rest. I don’t know, maybe it is everything being topsy turvy in the world, but it was really lovely finishing up this series about found family.
The spiciness level is a two. Yes, there is sex and yes it’s great! It really fits the characters and isn’t your run-of-the-mill hetero pound fest. It’s thoughtful and a little sub-dom. It made the book a nice follow up to Kitt Webb.
So, if you’re looking for found family, angry women serving justice, light sub-dom vibes, and good humor, I cannot recognize this book enough.
I don’t remember where I saw this recommended, but I feel like it was mentioned on a podcast. I am interested to read and think about how time can affect our perspective on relationships. Plus, this is a relatively short book, only 4 hours on audio, and after the 20 hours or more of the Three Body Problem books, that seems like an oasis.
As mentioned in my latest unhauling post, last month I visited Beth and we had a little vacay. Well, we couldn’t go on vacation without visiting a couple bookstores.
The first bookstore we went to was the Book Nook in Saranac Lake, New York. This is an independent bookshop that is tucked on the bend of a road and the first time we drove past it, I missed it. It is women-owned and has a nice selection of books for all ages. I stopped at their local interest table and found a copy of book by new-to-me author Genna Rose Nethercott, who had been to visit the store. So, I now have a signed copy of her book! Thistlefoot is the story of two estranged siblings who reunite following a death in the family. Hoping to have inherited something fun like land or money, they find out that what they’ve actually inherited is a sentient house on chicken legs. This looks to be a fun play on stories about Baba Yaga.
The second bookstore we visited was The Ripped Bodice in Brooklyn, New York. We’ve been to this one before, after it opened last year. This shop specializes in romance and it is a delight from it’s pink facade to the cool floor that is painted to look like a fancy tile design. (There are some neat reels about how they made that come together on their instagram.) Both times we’ve been there it was a little like being a kid in a candy store. I limited myself to three books. The one that I used as an excuse to get us to the book shop, the Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes, since I had just finished the first book in that series and loved it. Then I roamed the bookstore looking for titles that caught my eye. I settled on The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff. This book is about Geeta, a woman who is rumored to be a ‘self-made’ widow in her village and how she plays with that reputation. I’m really interested in themes of notoriety and freedom, so this one should be fun! The last book I bought on this trip… I don’t actually know what it is! The Ripped Bodice offers blind dates with a book, where you’re given a general description on the book and you have to decide to take a chance. This one is about someone seeking refuge in London from the French Occupation in Mexico. It’s set in a time period that interests me and promises an ‘unsuitable’ match, which is a fun trope. I’ve bought blind dates with books before. The Sisters Brothers in TBR one of these. I also picked one up the first time we visited the shop, too. I like the idea of a book surprise. So, I bought it thinking that the next time I need a pick-me-up, I can unwrap a present from my past self. One hopes to not have bad days, but it is nice to prepare fun surprises for yourself sometimes.
The Ripped Bodice also has loads of book swag. There are candles, totes, tees, pins, and stickers. Last year I picked up a tote that I’m now using as a project bag for a cardigan. This year I got a pin and a selection of stickers. We had a great time on vacation and I can’t wait to dig into these books! Do you like to hit bookstores on vacation? Which have been your favorite? What independent bookstores are on your list to find? Let us know in the comments!
This is the second of Cat Sebastian’s London Highway men series and it follows Marian Hayes, the Duchess of Clare, and Rob Brooks. I am so excited for this one!
2 Women, So Many Books 