Review: Kingdoms of Death (The Sun Eater #4)

 

Kingdoms of Death (The Sun Eater #4)

Publication Date: March 22, 2022

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hadrian Marlowe goes through some shit in KINGDOMS OF DEATH, a book that is . . . very aptly named. (My own title for this probably would've been something along the lines of THIS BOOK IS DESPAIR MADE FLESH, AQUIRE FLUFFY KITTEN AND HOLD ON TIGHT BEFORE READING, but I fully acknowledge that something like that would be difficult to print on a book spine.)

We open, once again, with a time jump, skipping over a twelve-year Chantry trial and a visit to Valka's homeland, along with Hadrian's seventy years' pseudo-imprisonment as an advisor to one of the Empire's three Magnarchs, a position between the Viceroys and the Emperor himself. Said Emperor has decided to go on an intergalactic tour, and shows up in person with a mission for his most dangerous servant: secure the aid of the Lothrian Commonwealth--the second-largest human civilization, and something of an Orwellian nightmare--against the Cielcin. What happens next is . . . well. That would be telling. All I'll say is this: you will learn more about the Cielcin and their dark gods. You will get to know Syriani Dorayaica. And you will truly begin to understand how the heroic Hadrian eventually becomes the Sun Eater.

This was difficult to read, and now I find it difficult to review. I debated giving this only four stars, not because it's poorly written--it's not--but simply because . . . in previous books, suffering has been leavened by triumphs. But this book is just one knockout punch after the other, an endless sea of 'oh god why's', and though there is a (very) brief spot of joy at the very end, I found that to be somewhat contrived. (And even it kind of ended badly.) Apparently there was originally a lot more to this book, and we're getting the second half in December. Judging books that have been split in two is always a chancy prospect, and I'll be curious to look back at KINGDOMS OF DEATH after reading Book 5. This didn't feel incomplete per se, just . . . it is an emotionally draining experience, and I wonder if it might have been less of one had it not been broken into two novels. (I might be wrong! Book 5 might be even more of a train of despair. But I feel compelled to point this out.) 

If you've read the previous three books, you'll read this book. But I have to say: if you've been feeling at all depressed, you might want to hold off until that dark cloud's passed, cause this book is, again, DESPAIR MADE FLESH. But if you're feeling up to it, then absolutely pick this one up--along with the closest fluffy kitten or adorable little puppy, which YOU WILL NEED--and steel yourself.

Cause this one's a *ride*, folks.

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Flames of Lethe (Lethe Chronicles #1) by Lexie Talionis

 

Flames of Lethe (Lethe Chronicles #1) by Lexie Talionis

Publication Date: November 16, 2021

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Jo and Christopher awake on a sea of endless glowing sand, with no clothes, resources, or memories of how they got there. Every time the sun rises, they burn in unspeakable agony . . . only to awake, completely unharmed, when the sun sets. As they traverse the sands, desperately seeking any form of shelter, tensions--sexual and otherwise--rise higher and higher. 

And then they reach The City, and discover that things can always, ALWAYS, get worse.

Flames of Lethe ticks all the boxes of a traditional dark fantasy erotic romance (and the author explicitly describes it as such), so I was a little confused to see this shelved on Netgalley under horror rather than romance. After finishing it, I can say with complete confidence that this? This is both. This is dark. If you don't like dark romance, this is not for you. If you do, this is a really excellent addition to the genre.

Writing-wise, this shows a lot of talent--I was absorbed from start to finish. The characters burst off the page, the pacing was excellent, and the worldbuilding was devastating. Our characters wonder often if they are in Hell, and this is quite an interesting interpretation of such a place.

I enjoyed this a lot, but NOT EVERYBODY WILL, and I think it's important to be very up front about that in a review. If you hate romance with dubcon/noncon, then give this one a hard pass. The world Jo finds herself in is not exactly a feminist utopia, and some of the choices she makes by the end might rub certain readers the wrong way. But if you're a romance fan looking for something (very) dark and original, this is an excellent book to try out. 

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Goblin by Josh Malerman

 

Goblin by Josh Malerman

Publication Date: May 18, 2021

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I hated this book and I hate that I hated this book. Bird Box was one of the more frightening books I've ever read, and The House at the Bottom of the Lake was a genuinely intriguing, original novella. I was excited to pick up this new offering from their author, and it sounded so good--six (well, seven or eight, depending on how you categorize the Prologue and Epilogue) interconnected novellas set in the town of Goblin, where it never stops raining, unspeakable things dwell in the woods, and there's something very, very wrong with the local police officers.

The problem was, the plots were so predictable that I kept guessing the endings only a few pages in. And the writing . . . plodded. There was no sense of creeping terror, no sense of mounting dread. I didn't care about the characters' fates, and I thought the author did a strangely poor job on Goblin itself; a town that should have been a character in its own right just fell flat to me. The stories are interconnected, in the sense that they're all set in Goblin and every once in a while a character shows up or is mentioned in multiple stories, but I thought they'd be a bit more interconnected. By which I mean: each of these basically stands alone, Prologue/Epilogue aside, and I thought that kind of defeated the point of the whole 'interconnected novellas' thing. Part of the fun in reading interconnected stories is spotting bits and pieces carrying over from one story to the next, and while there was a bit of that, I thought it was a far, far too small bit.

Of all the stories here, "A Mix-Up At the Zoo" was the only one that even moderately held my attention, and even that only came in flickers. These stories were, in a word, bland. And I doubt the author intended that, but . . . I think it boils down to this: these stories spent way too much time dwelling on things that didn't scare me, and far too little time on things that did. That's death to a horror novel.

The scariest thing about this book was seeing how much of it I still had to read. It's rare for me to give a book 1 star, but reading this was a chore and I know for a fact the author can do better.

Not recommended.

Review: The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk

 

The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk

Publication Date: October 13, 2020

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In a world strikingly similar to Regency England, Beatrice Clayborn is torn between her desire to become a full-fledged Magus and her deeply indebted family's need for her to marry well. Marriage would require her to be locked in a stifling anti-magic collar, lest a malicious spirit inhabit her unborn child, and so married women are forbidden from practicing magic. After conjuring a lesser spirit to aid her magic, Beatrice finds herself forced to navigate the annual Bargaining Season with a terrible secret, forced to find a way to somehow save both her family and her own prospects at future happiness. (While certain encounters with the wealthy, foreign-born Lavan siblings upend her life in ways that any romance fan will find, ahem, somewhat familiar.)

The Midnight Bargain is, in essence, a Regency romance. If you love regency romances, you will likely love this; if you hate them, then the opposite. I happen to love Regency romances--hence the 5 stars. I'm a huge fan of fantasies of manners for that same reason, and I've always enjoyed the subgenre most when such books lean more to the "manners" than the "fantasy". (Not that I prefer them fantasy-less; more that I think the strength of the subgenre likes in the 'manners' portion, and leaning too far to the 'fantasy' element strips the subgenre of what makes it interesting and unique.) And there is a strong fantasy element here--it's just that I felt the manners and romance factors were incredibly strong, which I saw as a plus.

I really enjoyed the author's choice to have the whole "women can't practice magic or demons inhabit their babies" thing be true. It would've been easier, and a bit more pedestrian, to have that turn out to be patriarchal propaganda. That Beatrice cannot easily have her cake and eat it too put meat on the plot's bones. The writing was vivid, the characters were well-drawn, and the plot moved at a good clip. (And Ianthe, of course . . . Ianthe was a treasure.)

There were a few discordant notes, but not too many. By the end, for example, I though the author was striving a bit too hard to introduce conflict, and it led to some absurd situations---the boat scene had me nodding along with Mr. Clayborn, and I really don't think I was meant to. And Beatrice's mother having no role in the social scene was just bizarre; Beatrice would just get dropped off at parties with no chaperone, which really doesn't happen in these types of books. 

But overall, I thought this was an excellent feminist romance, well-recommended for anyone who enjoys clever, well-written fantasies of manners.

Review: The Bloody Throne (Hostage of Empire #3) by S.C. Emmett

 

The Bloody Throne (Hostage of Empire #3) by S.C. Emmett 

Publication Date: March 29, 2022

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This conclusion to the Hostage of Empire trilogy certainly lives up to its title. From bloody battlefields to quiet tea-tables, all and sundry battle for power in and beyond mighty Zhaon-An, and let's just say the knives are *very* much out. I don't think it's too spoilery to say that not everyone makes it out alive.

It's difficult to review the final book in a trilogy with any real specificity without falling into spoiler-land, and as with all trilogies, no reader should begin with this installment. We pick up with the fallout of certain events at the end of the previous book, as the Tabrak invasion reaches its inevitably bloody climax, Komor Yala's love . . . quadrangle? (Is that right?) Well, *that* plays out in ways both expected and unexpected. And we get some new POVs (in addition to our current plethora) which add texture and nuance to the events we saw in the previous two books.

But on that note: for a trilogy as long and complex as this one, I was surprised at how . . . rushed? certain things felt. I wish we'd spent much more time in Shan, for example, dealing with their court politics. The Tabrak, too, finally get a couple of POVs here, and I found myself thinking that they probably should have appeared in book 1, or at least book 2; it felt, again, *rushed* to finally see the enemy here, rather than let that part of the storyline breathe a bit more. And certain characters' endings felt like they needed extra chapters to really play out properly, which is kind of insane given how long this book already was.  

Did I ultimately find the ending satisfying? That's a difficult question. I gave this four stars because, like its predecessors, it has all the backbiting and scheming a court politics junkie could desire. And the overwhelming majority of the book I adored. But like I said, some characters' endings seemed a bit . . . abrupt. And . . . without being too spoilery, there's a development right at the end that would've had me throwing my book across the room had I been reading a paper book rather than on an expensive piece of machinery. Two characters get an ending that I was clearly supposed to find satisfying, that I was clearly supposed to root for, but which I felt was out of character for both. (And this probably goes to the rushed pacing; there were hints we were going down this path, but they were so few and so late that they didn't feel like enough to counterweigh all the character development prior that rendered this ending, I thought, out of character.) 

But that's ultimately a personal preference, and I can see how others might disagree. Overall, if you enjoy your fantasy heavy on the court politics, I'd say this trilogy is absolutely for you.

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Review: The Liar's Knot (Rook and Rose #2) by M.A. Carrick

 

The Liar's Knot (Rook and Rose #2) by M.A. Carrick

Publication Date: December 7, 2021

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I struggled for a while with whether to grade this at 3.5 or 4 stars, because Book 2 of the Rook and Rose series is very much Book 2, with all the attendant issues that middle books so often have. Midway through, I had this pegged as a 3.5: decently entertaining (while not quite at the level of Book 1), but not something I was finding entirely absorbing, especially as there were some plot happenings midway through that I wasn't entirely enthused about. But by the end I was rating this as a solid 4 of 5, as the authors ultimately took the characters in a direction I found myself enjoying, and I find myself very interested to see where everyone finds themselves in Book 3.

It's difficult to describe the plot without spoiling things, other than to say that Ren's long con continues apace as the residents of Nadezra grapple with the events of the previous book, while long-held secrets of the city and her inhabitants threaten to burst forth. (Actually, I wish there'd been more of a recap of the first book because there were plot threads I found myself having to go back and refresh myself on.) There's a lot to like here: Ren's struggle between her three identities, her new superheroine status as the Rose oddly being the least challenging to her; Derossi Vargo's development from selfish crime lord to someone almost noble; the forming of Ren's new knot. I'm someone who loves political maneuverings in fantasy novels and this had surprisingly little of those (unless we count certain secret societies coming to the foreground), but ultimately I thought the choice to focus instead on building the characters' bonds worked well. 

But as I said above, this is also very much a middle book and it suffers from many of the weaknesses we often see in middle books. It was longer than it needed to be, and the pacing dragged at certain places, especially in the beginning and middle. Certain characters get the short-shrift--Donaia being the most egregious, to the point I kept expecting something vile to be happening to her on her 'vacation'--and it was hard to see where the story was going until the story had actually, you know, gotten there.

Overall, I think if you enjoyed the first book, I'd recommend picking this up and sticking with it to the end. 

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Walk Among Us by Cassandra Khaw; Genevieve Gornichec; Caitlin Starling

 

Walk Among Us by Cassandra Khaw; Genevieve Gornichec; Caitlin Starling

Publication Date: May 4, 2021

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Until this book, my experience with the role-playing game Vampire: the Masquerade began and ended with the short-lived 1990s-era TV show Kindred: the Embraced, which I still adore with the fire of ten thousand suns but which I knew all along probably had little to do with the source material. So I actually took a look at the online wiki for the game before reading this book, and I'm glad I did, because all three stories within basically assume you're already familiar with all the relevant Vampire: the Masquerade background lore. (Though to be fair, none of the stories is intensely lore-intensive, in the sense that you'll be completely lost without any preexisting background knowledge.) 

There are three stories here: the first follows a young human whose life is upended when she begins to encounter the Kindred; the second follows a newly-embraced Kindred as he struggles to navigate his new existence; and the third follows a longtime Kindred as she finds herself caught in certain inescapable webs of her existence. Of the three I thought the first was the strongest, both because the narrator's ignorance of the Kindred made the store more easily followable to a reader who'd never played the game before, and because there was a twist at the end that I genuinely didn't see coming. (Something I always appreciate!)

Overall, if you're a fan of the RPG, or if you're just in the mood for some decent vampire fiction, this is a decent afternoon read.