I hope everyone is enjoying summer as it’s wrapping up! Portland is pretty smoky at the moment which is no fun but I think it’s clearing up. I read six books this week and…I guess this was actually a pretty bad reading week. Before I started this blog, I never did weekly roundups so I never even really thought back on whether a week was good or bad, so that’s been kind of an interesting new perspective for me. Anyway, three of the books I read this week were mid, two of them were horrendous, and one was really great, so I think that works out to a net negative. We have two audiobooks, four ARCs, and one new release to talk about, so let’s get into it!
She Haunts Me Still by De Elizabeth
This was an ARC so you can read my full review here! This is a gothic “horror” fantasy novel about a young woman who starts college as a theater major at her mother’s alma mater, and uncovers some secrets that may
give her clarity about her mother’s death and the ghosts that haunted them both.
To be honest, I have wasted enough time both reading and writing about this book, so I’m going to keep this short. She Haunts Me Still is a profoundly unoriginal novel with tacky horror elements, terrible relationship development, and its juvenile writing and characters would result in it being labeled YA (and pretty shitty YA at that, because I like YA) if it weren’t for some deeply uncomfortable smut scenes. If you really want to hear me tear into it, feel free to read my full review, but in short I would just advise you to skip this book and find something better to read.
Hopeless Necromantic by Shiloh Briar
This is the first book in an ongoing romantasy series about a necromancer who has given up on helping to defend the kingdom after the death of his wife and brother-in-law until the only demon in the queen’s forces convinces him
to rejoin the fray.
I feel kind of mixed on this. On one hand, it was cute and genuinely funny. Ben—the undead skeleton of Sikras’s brother-in-law—was an absolute joy and the narrators did a great job. But overall, I just wasn’t that into the story or the romance and was just kind of sick of it by the end. It’s weird, because I feel like I mostly enjoyed it as I was listening to it, but I feel weirdly negatively looking back on it. There are stakes but it’s a little too cozy for my taste, so that’s probably part of it. I did like the banter between Sikras and Helspira but I guess I just didn’t care about their relationship. I don’t really know what went wrong for me with this, but it’s definitely worth a shot if you like cozy fantasy/romantasy. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right headspace.
The Lord of the Wood by E. M. Anderson
This is a queer horror (??) fantasy about a clock repairer named Arthur who is offered a job that will give him the means to take care of his sister and her children and will allow him to pursue the life he
has long hoped for. However, the job requires him to travel through Shiftleaf, the magical forest that swallowed his father and that seems to be causing a strange, incurable illness in their town. Despite his fear, Arthur sets off, motivated by the stories his father told him of the forest’s beauty and the Lord of the Wood who serves as its guardian.
This book had all of the right ingredients for me to love it (magical forests, queer romance, disability rep, clocks/watches, fae, horror elements, etc.) and then I just didn’t. First, I’ll address the (??) I put next to “horror”—on Goodreads, the top two tags on tags on this book are “fantasy” followed by “horror,” and I haven’t got a single clue why this is tagged as horror. It’s not that it’s not scary because there are plenty of books I consider horror that I don’t find scary (see my review of A Veritable Household Pet in last week’s roundup), but there’s just *flaps hands* there’s no horror! Not even a little, probably less than Hopeless Necromantic which at least had undead and that isn’t tagged as horror.
The story is extremely slow to pick up and you only really get to the forest maybe 35% of the way in (mind you, this book is 450 pages, so that 35% is no joke), and from that point on basically it’s just kind of characters walking around. That can be interesting (see the next book in this roundup), but in this case it’s not. The characters are fine, but forgettable. I think this book could have been forgiven if not for a single line:
“He yeeted the stone at it.”
WHY??? Never in my life have I had such violent whiplash. This book takes places in a different world and time period, I have no clue why this was included. It’s not like The Locked Tomb where there are a bunch of meme/pop culture references (and a canon reason why they’re there, god tier series btw), it’s the only time it happens in the book, completely out of nowhere like 70% in and I damn near dropped the book altogether because of it.
That’s enough bitching from me. The premise (and the title *side-eye*) is relatively similar to Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh which is an amazing queer fantasy set in a forest with fae, and it’s a novella so it doesn’t waste time on characters walking around aimlessly for 300 pages. Just read that instead.
This was an ARC so you can read my full review here! This is a dark fantasy novel about a wolf named Blacktail who kills a family of humans who were responsible for the death of his mate. After taking his vengeance and
going on the run to escape the humans hunting him, a mysteriously powerful feline witch sends him on a quest to wake the Forest God, whose reawakening will bring the end of humanity and return dominion over the world to the beasts.
This book was easily the highlight of the week! I read and enjoyed Scott Hawkins’ debut The Library at Mount Char which is very dark and very unique but also kind of senselessly violent. In Blacktail, Hawkins takes his talent for unique storytelling and constructs this really incredible odyssey that is also violent but in a way that makes sense for the world and the stakes. Despite the characters not being human, Hawkins does a good job striking a balance between making the perspectives, thought processes, and beliefs distinct enough that the narrators truly feel like animals, while also tying in emotions and conflicts that parallel human experiences enough for the reader to relate to them. Like The Lord of the Wood, it’s a book about a journey, but it doesn’t feel aimless or stretched out, in fact it’s a pretty tight story under 300 pages. I’m a little mixed on the endings but it didn’t retroactively ruin the rest of the book so it’s not a big deal.
It’s a pretty gritty read but really well-done and I definitely teared up at a few points. If you want a fresh take on a hero’s journey (or if you were a Warrior Cats kid because this is absolutely Warrior Cats for adults) I recommend picking it up!
Songbird in the Gallows by Alta Hensley
This is a straight dark romance retelling of Bluebeard (with some fantasy elements) about a woman named (*sigh*) Saylor who meets a retired killer named Blue and asks him to teach her how to kill so she can take
out the men who killed her father.
This was the other book I hated and I’m getting annoyed just thinking about it. For one, I kind of forgot that this was a Bluebeard retelling until I started reading it, but it really isn’t other than the fact that the love interest is named Blue and literally has a blue beard. If I were writing a Bluebeard romance retelling, that’s probably the first thing I would cut because between having an extremely crisp beard, curly mustache, and blue hair, I doubt I could find Blue less attractive. The story doesn’t have much to do with Bluebeard, which is a shame because I think I would like a good Bluebeard retelling. I also wasn’t expecting the fantasy elements and they just don’t really make sense in this type of story. It’s just a whole poorly thought-through mess. All my love to audiobook narrators, but the male narrator really couldn’t do a woman’s voice and made Saylor sound super whiny and pathetic and the female narrator couldn’t do a man’s voice and made Blue sound super cringey so that didn’t help.
It probably goes without saying, but Saylor is a stupid name. The title of the book also has to relation to the book expect someone says something like it in the first chapter, so it seems like they just picked a cool-sounding title and shoved it in.
TLDR: It sucked and I hated it. Pick up Butcher & Blackbird or Lights Out instead which are much better and funnier.
This was an ARC so you can read my full review here! This is a literary sci-fi novel about a woman named Laurel who leaves her job in academic mycology to work as a dishwasher at the isolated McMurdo Research Station in
Antarctica in an attempt to get away from her failed marriage and the tragedy that caused it. When Laurel’s ex-husband coincidentally also arrives at the station with his own theories about the mysterious anomaly called the Arc, the two work together in the hopes that the anomaly will allow them to go back and face their greatest mistake.
(Slight spoilers ahead—it’s hard to talk about this book and completely avoid them.)
This book started off strong with Laurel’s life on the research station, but once Eli comes into the picture and they use the Arc to travel to the parallel universe, it lost me. Time travels in the opposite direction in the second universe (i.e. people start as old people and become younger, November comes before October, etc.), which is already pretty confusing, and then towards the end it flashes between multiple timelines and flashbacks from the first universe you have some backward and some forward timelines and the 1999 backwards timeline comes after the 2005 backwards timeline and it’s just a shitshow. There isn’t a clear reason to break up these timelines—they could be told chronologically (backwards) and it wouldn’t change much.
I didn’t find the characters or relationships particularly compelling, particularly the relationship between Eli and Laurel which I think is meant to be the “love story” mentioned in the marketing even though they just don’t seem to get along that well in general. The writing is solid and it’s definitely an interesting concept, but it gets kind of needlessly confusing and in a book as conceptually challenging as this you really need strong characters and relationships to motivate you through, especially because it’s over 500 pages.
So yeah, not a great reading week but at least Blacktail was good! I said in my last roundup that I would be focusing on ARCs this week and I think I was pretty successful since I got through three of them. I still have seven on my NetGalley shelf and one request pending so I’d like to get through a couple more this week. One coming out on 9/8 is Adam, Mine by K. Ancrum which is a queer Frankenstein retelling. I’ve read most of K. Ancrum’s books and they’re reliably good so I’m excited. The other I have also coming out on 9/8 is Strange is the Light by Sarah Maria Griffin which is a fantasy novel about a group of childhood friends who open a dimensional rift into the world of their DND game, which sounds like a good time. I also have a bunch of books checked out on Libby: The Winter Folk by Jen Julian which is an Appalachian horror novel (niche subgenre I love), The Traveler by Joseph Eckert which is a time-travel sci-fi novel about a father and son, and The Revenant of Surolifia by Florence Chien which is a queer political fantasy. I also just got the second and third Fablehaven books on audio so I’m excited to continue my reread of one of my favorite childhood series’!
Have you read any of these? Did I convince you to read one of them (or not to read one of them)? By all means, let me know what you’ve enjoyed recently or what you’re looking forward to!
Happy reading!
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