Book Logging (Paper, ebook)
Mar. 5th, 2021 01:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckCharles, KJ. Slippery Creatures; The Sugared Game - Overdrive ebooks. I liked both of these. They're post-WWI m/m romances with characters I enjoyed spending time with and pulp plots that ticked along nicely.
Cooper, Isabel. Highland Dragon Warrior - Overdrive ebook. Compared to The Stormbringer this book is paced more like a standard romance. It's a historical fantasy with Scottish shapeshifting dragons and a Jewish alchemist. I'm insufficiently familiar with the setting to be sure how much research the author did or how different the history is. I liked the characters but kind of wished they'd actually talk to each other. The (male) dragon shifter doesn't really understand the additional weight of risk that the heroine's facing due to being a Jewish stranger in a medieval Christian community. He gets the fact that he's a dragon and a lord and therefore a threat, but he doesn't get that she has to regard other people in the community as potential threats. Together, they fight an evil necromancer. It was perfectly fine.
Cooper, Isabel. The Stormbringer - Overdrive ebook. This was an odd duck. I got the impression that it was being marketed as a romance with fantasy elements when it was rather more a fantasy with romantic elements. Also, those elements were unbalanced. Most of the second half of the book was war scenes from a small, frontier outpost trying to hold against a siege by the Forces of Evil. The romance is also kind of weird in as much as there's sort of a triangle. One of the protagonists (male) was suspended in time for a century as part of a spell to trap the Big Bad. The other is a paladin who finds him and releases him after the Big Bad has already escaped. The hitch is that her soul bonded, sentient, magic using sword contains the soul of his husband. Both of the human characters spend a lot of time being strongly attracted but not being willing to risk hurting the sword's feelings by having any sort of sex with each other (both of them feel that sex with other people would be fine since none of them would have the emotional and telepathic ties to the guy in the sword). The sword eventually points out that he was 80-something when he became a sword and had married still another person in that the 50-ish years after the male protagonist vanished and that, after having been a sword for decades, he doesn't really have a sex drive. The two of them are distracted on the eve of battle and, given that he's telepathically connected to them both, really distracting. That and the sex happened before the siege started and tied up the romantic plot, but the book to that point read like the romance was the central plot. The fact that the next book in the series is supposed to focus on different characters inclines me to think that the Big Bad and the Forces of Evil are set dressing. Then again, the fighting occupied a largish chunk of the book. I think the book was perfectly fine as it was, but it didn't match my expectations for pacing or focus.
de Bodard, Aliette. Seven of Infinities - I think I'd have liked this better if it had been longer and had had more room for character development. I could infer a lot about the setting, but I never actually got a firm sense of why some of the characters liked or trusted each other or why the sexual attraction happened at all. That last came across as me being expected to understand a lot of UST short hand that I'm simply not literate in. I didn't disbelieve that aspect so much as I felt that I didn't know the characters well enough to care one way or the other or to accept it as a fundamental motivating factor. Likely a me-problem rather than a narrative problem given the number of much shorter fics out there with similar levels of the story working once the attraction is accepted as a valid premise.
Fisher, Catherine. The Clockwork Crow - This is a very short kids' fantasy. The protagonist is an orphan being taken in by (I think) her godparents after her aunt's death. She finds herself at a country estate with no company but a handful of servants, none of whom are willing to answer her questions about the absent family. On her way there, she accidentally came into possession of the titular clockwork crow in a disassembled state. I suspect that this is one of those books that, when read at exactly the right age, seem broader and deeper in terms of the events and the worldbuilding than I found this one. That's not a slam on the book; it was well enough written. It's just that being a genre savvy adult means not being quite as enchanted by the loosely woven fabric of the setting, characters, and plot.
Iyer, Pico. A Beginner's Guide to Japan - Most of this was rather more in the style of Sei Shonagon than any sort of expository and continuous text. There's a paragraph on this and a paragraph on that; sometimes a topic gets as much as a page and a half, but that's rare. The author has lived in Japan for decades, and most of the entries are his descriptions and, sometimes, interpretations of things he's observed. I have no idea what his level of accuracy is, but some bits are admiring and others judgmental. It's not anthropological, but there is some smugness. I don't regret reading it, but I'm also not sure I learned anything because I knew nothing about the author going in and therefore had no idea what his biases were.
James, Anna. The Bookwanderers - Overdrive ebook. The main character and her friend discover that they have the ability to read themselves into works of fiction. There's a whole secret organization of people who have the ability. The protagonist's father is dead, and her mother is missing. She's being raised by her mother's parents who run a book store. I found the book store frustrating because, while it sound like an amazing place for childhood exploration and hide and seek and discovery, it also sounds like an accessibility nightmare-- mostly vertical with spiral staircases and high shelves accessed only by ladder. I suspect that it didn't even occur to the author that the book store layout meant some readers would have the fantasy of participation broken before the story even got to the magic. I still plan to read the sequels, but the book store layout is a caveat applied to any sort of recommendation.
James, Anna. The Lost Fairy Tales - Overdrive ebook. Pages & Co. Series 2. This book adds complications to the first book, including new villains. The two kids get stuck in a book of fairy tales after getting conflicting advice from their respective grandparents about whether or not bookwandering in fairy tales is safe. The answer is that it's a lot less safe than it used to be and that they may not have a choice anyway because the fairy tales are trying to drag them in.
Kingfisher, T. Swordheart - Overdrive ebook. I read this with a several month long gap between the first half and the second because there was a long waitlist. I don't remember why I didn't finish the first time I checked it out; I suspect it was something like an exchange deadline or a long migraine. At any rate, the female protagonist here is a widow who has come into an unexpected inheritance and needs to escape relatives who want to force her into a marriage in order to get her inheritance. The male protagonist is a spirit bound to a sword who manifests physically when the sword is drawn and vanishes when it's completely sheathed again. He's bound to protect and obey the owner of the sword. In this case, that's the widow. There's a fair amount of traveling in the course of the book, and I felt like I was getting a fair sense of the place and the people. I think most of the incidents were intended to give the characters time to trust each other and to be complicated beings. I want to reread this one, eventually. When the waitlist is shorter.
Koch, Bea. Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency - Overdrive ebook. This is a fairly superficial history aimed at a general audience. The author has broken things down a bit so that the chapter headings are things like 'Science' and 'Literature' with each chapter profiling multiple women (and not just the usual suspects). There were a couple of minor things that pinged me as possibly not right, but I didn't actually check other sources, so I'm not going to be specific. Mainly, I mention the not quite right to emphasize that this is a starting place rather than a book that's going to give exhaustive biographical information about anyone. The style is fairly breezy.
Krentz, Jayne Ann. All the Colors of Night - Romance with psychic powers. I got exactly what I expected, and I no longer remember the specific characters and events at all (It has been about a month). Krentz's books tend not to have ongoing conflict between the eventual romantic partners but rather to have them standing together against mysterious enemies. I like that aspect. (Note that Krentz's early romances don't follow this pattern and tend rather more toward manly men knowing much better about everything than the pretty little ladies. I'm vastly less keen on those.)
Mejia, Tehlor Kay. Paola Santiago and the River of Tears - Overdrive ebook. Rick Riordan Presents book. Paola and a male friend whose name I've forgotten have to venture into other worlds in order to rescue a missing friend. They run into problems because people lie to them and/or misunderstand the nature of the world they're in. Paola is occasionally frustrating as a point of view character, but she's frustrating in ways that make sense for who she is and for her background.
Milan, Courtney. The Duke Who Didn't - Overdrive ebook. Historical romance with very likable characters. I had some anxiety as I neared the end of the story because I thought I still had 15% or more of story left to go and that that would require plot complications. Instead, I found a long author's note in which Milan talked about her own family's history and about her research for the book. It was fascinating but also... It came across as a tired admission that some readers are going to give her shit for writing non-white characters in Victorian England, and that made me sad and angry on her behalf in a 'This is why we don't have more nice things' way. Racism is a major part of the backstory for both hero and heroine, and it exists as a (mostly) distant part of the setting but is usually about as plot relevant as which direction the wind is blowing. Which is to say that it could be if the author chose to make it so, but mostly she's focused on letting the hero and heroine be happy together. Them being happy together was A+ would read again. I found the biracial hero's aunt's racism most painful because she loved him while desperately wanting him to act (and to be) whiter. It was very Nice White Lady, present-company-excepted racism which is so much more insidious and so thoroughly a gaslighting technique. I had some personal difficulties reading about the heroine's father who has rheumatoid arthritis and can end up in excruciating pain for days if he over uses his hands. This is not because it was handled badly so much as that it kept turning my attention back to my hands and making me think about how much easier my life would be with the application of vast amounts of money.
Nix, Garth. The Left-Handed Booksellers of London - I liked this in the same sorts of ways that I liked Sabriel when I first encountered it (back when it was a standalone). That is, there are a lot of fascinating threads that vanish off the edges of the story. The protagonist of this one, however, starts with a lot less information than Sabriel did. The story is set in England in the 1980s but an AU England in which Margaret Thatcher is the second female prime minister rather than the first and the lead characters in The Professionals are all female. At any rate, there's a magical world under the surface of everyday life. The titular booksellers have a royal mandate to clean up any issues that turn up, but they also have to make a living, so they run bookstores. A caveat-- Merlin (no, not that one) who is the protagonist's initial point of contact with the magical world asks her, on very brief acquaintance, whether or not she thinks he'd look well as a woman and that he's considering making a change. She asks if they can do that with magic. He says no then amends to not easily or without (non-specific) outside help. Merlin later turns up in a dress, and the protagonist wonders if she ought to think of Merlin with different pronouns. She doesn't ask, and everyone in the narrative continues using he/him for Merlin (without him commenting). They end up changing clothing later, and the question just kind of... vanishes. It doesn't come across as the characters being too busy to address it or not feeling like it needs to be. It also doesn't come across as the setting being sufficiently different from 1983 London in our world that it's unremarkable (maybe I missed something???). It comes across rather more as if the author just got too busy to track it or too unsure how to make it work. The whole thing may read differently to someone who's not me, but it's something that snagged me as pasted-on-yay and that didn't have to be.
O'Leary, Beth. The Switch - Leena and her grandmother, Eileen, swap living spaces after Leena's boss gives her a mandatory eight week vacation. That puts Eileen in London and Leena in the sort of small town where the neighborhood watch meeting is a social high point. I enjoyed the book but also got the impression that there were a lot of incidents that I'd somehow missed (because they weren't in the text directly). I could follow events and infer the bits that weren't there, but it felt a little weird, as if I was missing crucial bits of the characters' emotional arcs.
Pandian, Gigi. The Accidental Alchemist - Overdrive ebook. First book in a mystery series about an unaging and centuries old alchemist and a gargoyle who needs her help. The ebook had some formatting issues, just occasional paragraphing problems that left me a little confused about who was talking/acting at certain points. I'll be reading more.
Pape, Cindy Spencer. Ether & Elephants - Overdrive ebook. Paranormal steampunk romance. I ended up kind of irritated by this one. Part of that was me wanting to cheer on the heroine's decision to remain single in the face of various men being assholes. Part of that was me not wanting to deal with the section of the story set in India and a bit too happy about the British being in charge. I think I will skip the book in the series that's titled Cards and Caravans; the couple from that book appear in this one, and the author is perfectly happy to label the heroine with a racial slur (which one can be inferred from the book title) which is period appropriate but... I think that reading a full book of that would be too much.
Riordan, Rick. Percy Jackson and the Singer of Apollo - Overdrive ebook. Short story in the Percy Jackson universe with Percy and Grover tracking down a rogue automaton.
Stanley, Diane. The Silver Bowl - Short kids' book. The protagonist in this one is a girl with just a little bit of magic. She goes to work in the royal castle, in the kitchen. Eventually, she gets promoted to polishing silver and finds the titular silver bowl keeps giving her visions that she doesn't want and doesn't know what to do with. They indicate that the spate of deaths in the royal family is no accident but the working of a curse laid when the current king was an infant. She has no evidence and no solution, so she tries to avoid the bowl. She and two friends manage to rescue the last member of the royal family and do their best to keep him alive.
Thomas, Sherry. The Burning Sky - Overdrive ebook. YA fantasy with teens from a secondary world attending an English boarding school, undercover, while trying to prepare to overthrow the Evil Empire back in their own world. I liked the characters, and I'm very curious about where the series goes. The library only has book 2 as an audiobook, so I'm on the waitlist for that version.
Tolan, Stephanie. Applewhites at Wit's End - The Applewhite family needs to raise money quick, so they hit on a scheme of hosting a small (and very expensive) summer camp, using their artistic reputations as a draw. The results are mixed. I felt like this book was more of a skeleton of a story than the story itself. Part of that was that the book added half a dozen new characters but kept them flat. The protagonists don't really develop as characters, either. It was all still fun and very Bagthorpe-y, though.
Trevayne, Emma. Spindrift and the Orchid - This is a kids' book, secondary world fantasy. Spindrift is an orphan being raised by her grandfather after both her parents died when their ship went down. She finds a magical artifact with the power to grant certain types of wishes and sets out to find out what actually happened to her parents. The book is about 250 pages and starts slowly enough that I'm not sure the pacing works. I liked the writing otherwise, and the story is a standalone. The artifact ends up kind of One Ring-ish.
Turner, Megan Whalen. Return of the Thief - I enjoyed this one once I got myself to start. I got the paper version from the library and kept eying the size and considering the weight of it. In the end, I had to read in short bursts so that I wouldn't hold any position too long or try to hold the book in my hands for reading. Anyway, this is the last book in a series and really not the place to start the series. I think it ties up a lot of things satisfactorily while still being clear that where the story ends isn't the same thing as where life ends.
Waite, Olivia. The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Overdrive ebook. F/F historical romance. Pining, pining, and more pining. Seriously, ⅔ of the book was pining. Fortunately, I liked the characters and the things they were doing while pining, so I didn't mind too much even though I'm not big on pining.
Started but not finished
Bachmann, Stefan. The Peculiar - Overdrive ebook. Children's fantasy. I read almost half of this, but I found myself out of charity with both POV characters to the point that I resented every word I read. Other readers might not have this issue. I just figured there wasn't much point if I wasn't enjoying it. I need to get better at bailing on books that I'm reacting to like that.
Roberts, Nora. Stars of Fortune - Overdrive ebook. Guardians Trilogy 1. Read the prologue and part of the first chapter and disliked the style. I'd given the prologue a pass on that because it was a prologue and the main narrative might be more congenial, but I didn't find it so. The library has a lot of other books by this author that don't have waitlists, so I don't feel much need to stick with one that's not clicking. Right now, I think I like her contemporaries more than her fantasies. I need to try her mysteries again (I tried the first one before Cordelia was born, and I bounced off it then. Now? Who knows?).
Terrill, Cristin. All Our Yesterdays - I tried this as an audiobook, twice, and kept stopping because I didn't actually care about the twists and turns of the plot. I just wanted to know about the rules the author had chosen for time travel. I also wanted to know whether the time traveling characters were causing the problems they wanted to fix. The answer to the second question was no. Well, mostly no. They'd come back more than a dozen times to try to change things, and their opponents had time traveled more often than that. The answer to the second wasn't explicit, but I think I understood it. The text is very set on the notion that time is sentient and tries to repair itself but doesn't really explain what 'repair' means. I found the ending emotionally unsatisfying, and it needs a trigger warning for suicide that leads to everyone else forgetting everything that happened except for the suicide.
Thakrar, Shveta. Star Daughter - This is well written with some fascinating world building, but I find the idea of magical beings who bestow inspiration just a little creepy. Also, I wasn't feeling very sympathetic to teenage characters, generally, and the book had a waitlist. If I'd had another week, I might have finished; I also might not have.
Cooper, Isabel. Highland Dragon Warrior - Overdrive ebook. Compared to The Stormbringer this book is paced more like a standard romance. It's a historical fantasy with Scottish shapeshifting dragons and a Jewish alchemist. I'm insufficiently familiar with the setting to be sure how much research the author did or how different the history is. I liked the characters but kind of wished they'd actually talk to each other. The (male) dragon shifter doesn't really understand the additional weight of risk that the heroine's facing due to being a Jewish stranger in a medieval Christian community. He gets the fact that he's a dragon and a lord and therefore a threat, but he doesn't get that she has to regard other people in the community as potential threats. Together, they fight an evil necromancer. It was perfectly fine.
Cooper, Isabel. The Stormbringer - Overdrive ebook. This was an odd duck. I got the impression that it was being marketed as a romance with fantasy elements when it was rather more a fantasy with romantic elements. Also, those elements were unbalanced. Most of the second half of the book was war scenes from a small, frontier outpost trying to hold against a siege by the Forces of Evil. The romance is also kind of weird in as much as there's sort of a triangle. One of the protagonists (male) was suspended in time for a century as part of a spell to trap the Big Bad. The other is a paladin who finds him and releases him after the Big Bad has already escaped. The hitch is that her soul bonded, sentient, magic using sword contains the soul of his husband. Both of the human characters spend a lot of time being strongly attracted but not being willing to risk hurting the sword's feelings by having any sort of sex with each other (both of them feel that sex with other people would be fine since none of them would have the emotional and telepathic ties to the guy in the sword). The sword eventually points out that he was 80-something when he became a sword and had married still another person in that the 50-ish years after the male protagonist vanished and that, after having been a sword for decades, he doesn't really have a sex drive. The two of them are distracted on the eve of battle and, given that he's telepathically connected to them both, really distracting. That and the sex happened before the siege started and tied up the romantic plot, but the book to that point read like the romance was the central plot. The fact that the next book in the series is supposed to focus on different characters inclines me to think that the Big Bad and the Forces of Evil are set dressing. Then again, the fighting occupied a largish chunk of the book. I think the book was perfectly fine as it was, but it didn't match my expectations for pacing or focus.
de Bodard, Aliette. Seven of Infinities - I think I'd have liked this better if it had been longer and had had more room for character development. I could infer a lot about the setting, but I never actually got a firm sense of why some of the characters liked or trusted each other or why the sexual attraction happened at all. That last came across as me being expected to understand a lot of UST short hand that I'm simply not literate in. I didn't disbelieve that aspect so much as I felt that I didn't know the characters well enough to care one way or the other or to accept it as a fundamental motivating factor. Likely a me-problem rather than a narrative problem given the number of much shorter fics out there with similar levels of the story working once the attraction is accepted as a valid premise.
Fisher, Catherine. The Clockwork Crow - This is a very short kids' fantasy. The protagonist is an orphan being taken in by (I think) her godparents after her aunt's death. She finds herself at a country estate with no company but a handful of servants, none of whom are willing to answer her questions about the absent family. On her way there, she accidentally came into possession of the titular clockwork crow in a disassembled state. I suspect that this is one of those books that, when read at exactly the right age, seem broader and deeper in terms of the events and the worldbuilding than I found this one. That's not a slam on the book; it was well enough written. It's just that being a genre savvy adult means not being quite as enchanted by the loosely woven fabric of the setting, characters, and plot.
Iyer, Pico. A Beginner's Guide to Japan - Most of this was rather more in the style of Sei Shonagon than any sort of expository and continuous text. There's a paragraph on this and a paragraph on that; sometimes a topic gets as much as a page and a half, but that's rare. The author has lived in Japan for decades, and most of the entries are his descriptions and, sometimes, interpretations of things he's observed. I have no idea what his level of accuracy is, but some bits are admiring and others judgmental. It's not anthropological, but there is some smugness. I don't regret reading it, but I'm also not sure I learned anything because I knew nothing about the author going in and therefore had no idea what his biases were.
James, Anna. The Bookwanderers - Overdrive ebook. The main character and her friend discover that they have the ability to read themselves into works of fiction. There's a whole secret organization of people who have the ability. The protagonist's father is dead, and her mother is missing. She's being raised by her mother's parents who run a book store. I found the book store frustrating because, while it sound like an amazing place for childhood exploration and hide and seek and discovery, it also sounds like an accessibility nightmare-- mostly vertical with spiral staircases and high shelves accessed only by ladder. I suspect that it didn't even occur to the author that the book store layout meant some readers would have the fantasy of participation broken before the story even got to the magic. I still plan to read the sequels, but the book store layout is a caveat applied to any sort of recommendation.
James, Anna. The Lost Fairy Tales - Overdrive ebook. Pages & Co. Series 2. This book adds complications to the first book, including new villains. The two kids get stuck in a book of fairy tales after getting conflicting advice from their respective grandparents about whether or not bookwandering in fairy tales is safe. The answer is that it's a lot less safe than it used to be and that they may not have a choice anyway because the fairy tales are trying to drag them in.
Kingfisher, T. Swordheart - Overdrive ebook. I read this with a several month long gap between the first half and the second because there was a long waitlist. I don't remember why I didn't finish the first time I checked it out; I suspect it was something like an exchange deadline or a long migraine. At any rate, the female protagonist here is a widow who has come into an unexpected inheritance and needs to escape relatives who want to force her into a marriage in order to get her inheritance. The male protagonist is a spirit bound to a sword who manifests physically when the sword is drawn and vanishes when it's completely sheathed again. He's bound to protect and obey the owner of the sword. In this case, that's the widow. There's a fair amount of traveling in the course of the book, and I felt like I was getting a fair sense of the place and the people. I think most of the incidents were intended to give the characters time to trust each other and to be complicated beings. I want to reread this one, eventually. When the waitlist is shorter.
Koch, Bea. Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency - Overdrive ebook. This is a fairly superficial history aimed at a general audience. The author has broken things down a bit so that the chapter headings are things like 'Science' and 'Literature' with each chapter profiling multiple women (and not just the usual suspects). There were a couple of minor things that pinged me as possibly not right, but I didn't actually check other sources, so I'm not going to be specific. Mainly, I mention the not quite right to emphasize that this is a starting place rather than a book that's going to give exhaustive biographical information about anyone. The style is fairly breezy.
Krentz, Jayne Ann. All the Colors of Night - Romance with psychic powers. I got exactly what I expected, and I no longer remember the specific characters and events at all (It has been about a month). Krentz's books tend not to have ongoing conflict between the eventual romantic partners but rather to have them standing together against mysterious enemies. I like that aspect. (Note that Krentz's early romances don't follow this pattern and tend rather more toward manly men knowing much better about everything than the pretty little ladies. I'm vastly less keen on those.)
Mejia, Tehlor Kay. Paola Santiago and the River of Tears - Overdrive ebook. Rick Riordan Presents book. Paola and a male friend whose name I've forgotten have to venture into other worlds in order to rescue a missing friend. They run into problems because people lie to them and/or misunderstand the nature of the world they're in. Paola is occasionally frustrating as a point of view character, but she's frustrating in ways that make sense for who she is and for her background.
Milan, Courtney. The Duke Who Didn't - Overdrive ebook. Historical romance with very likable characters. I had some anxiety as I neared the end of the story because I thought I still had 15% or more of story left to go and that that would require plot complications. Instead, I found a long author's note in which Milan talked about her own family's history and about her research for the book. It was fascinating but also... It came across as a tired admission that some readers are going to give her shit for writing non-white characters in Victorian England, and that made me sad and angry on her behalf in a 'This is why we don't have more nice things' way. Racism is a major part of the backstory for both hero and heroine, and it exists as a (mostly) distant part of the setting but is usually about as plot relevant as which direction the wind is blowing. Which is to say that it could be if the author chose to make it so, but mostly she's focused on letting the hero and heroine be happy together. Them being happy together was A+ would read again. I found the biracial hero's aunt's racism most painful because she loved him while desperately wanting him to act (and to be) whiter. It was very Nice White Lady, present-company-excepted racism which is so much more insidious and so thoroughly a gaslighting technique. I had some personal difficulties reading about the heroine's father who has rheumatoid arthritis and can end up in excruciating pain for days if he over uses his hands. This is not because it was handled badly so much as that it kept turning my attention back to my hands and making me think about how much easier my life would be with the application of vast amounts of money.
Nix, Garth. The Left-Handed Booksellers of London - I liked this in the same sorts of ways that I liked Sabriel when I first encountered it (back when it was a standalone). That is, there are a lot of fascinating threads that vanish off the edges of the story. The protagonist of this one, however, starts with a lot less information than Sabriel did. The story is set in England in the 1980s but an AU England in which Margaret Thatcher is the second female prime minister rather than the first and the lead characters in The Professionals are all female. At any rate, there's a magical world under the surface of everyday life. The titular booksellers have a royal mandate to clean up any issues that turn up, but they also have to make a living, so they run bookstores. A caveat-- Merlin (no, not that one) who is the protagonist's initial point of contact with the magical world asks her, on very brief acquaintance, whether or not she thinks he'd look well as a woman and that he's considering making a change. She asks if they can do that with magic. He says no then amends to not easily or without (non-specific) outside help. Merlin later turns up in a dress, and the protagonist wonders if she ought to think of Merlin with different pronouns. She doesn't ask, and everyone in the narrative continues using he/him for Merlin (without him commenting). They end up changing clothing later, and the question just kind of... vanishes. It doesn't come across as the characters being too busy to address it or not feeling like it needs to be. It also doesn't come across as the setting being sufficiently different from 1983 London in our world that it's unremarkable (maybe I missed something???). It comes across rather more as if the author just got too busy to track it or too unsure how to make it work. The whole thing may read differently to someone who's not me, but it's something that snagged me as pasted-on-yay and that didn't have to be.
O'Leary, Beth. The Switch - Leena and her grandmother, Eileen, swap living spaces after Leena's boss gives her a mandatory eight week vacation. That puts Eileen in London and Leena in the sort of small town where the neighborhood watch meeting is a social high point. I enjoyed the book but also got the impression that there were a lot of incidents that I'd somehow missed (because they weren't in the text directly). I could follow events and infer the bits that weren't there, but it felt a little weird, as if I was missing crucial bits of the characters' emotional arcs.
Pandian, Gigi. The Accidental Alchemist - Overdrive ebook. First book in a mystery series about an unaging and centuries old alchemist and a gargoyle who needs her help. The ebook had some formatting issues, just occasional paragraphing problems that left me a little confused about who was talking/acting at certain points. I'll be reading more.
Pape, Cindy Spencer. Ether & Elephants - Overdrive ebook. Paranormal steampunk romance. I ended up kind of irritated by this one. Part of that was me wanting to cheer on the heroine's decision to remain single in the face of various men being assholes. Part of that was me not wanting to deal with the section of the story set in India and a bit too happy about the British being in charge. I think I will skip the book in the series that's titled Cards and Caravans; the couple from that book appear in this one, and the author is perfectly happy to label the heroine with a racial slur (which one can be inferred from the book title) which is period appropriate but... I think that reading a full book of that would be too much.
Riordan, Rick. Percy Jackson and the Singer of Apollo - Overdrive ebook. Short story in the Percy Jackson universe with Percy and Grover tracking down a rogue automaton.
Stanley, Diane. The Silver Bowl - Short kids' book. The protagonist in this one is a girl with just a little bit of magic. She goes to work in the royal castle, in the kitchen. Eventually, she gets promoted to polishing silver and finds the titular silver bowl keeps giving her visions that she doesn't want and doesn't know what to do with. They indicate that the spate of deaths in the royal family is no accident but the working of a curse laid when the current king was an infant. She has no evidence and no solution, so she tries to avoid the bowl. She and two friends manage to rescue the last member of the royal family and do their best to keep him alive.
Thomas, Sherry. The Burning Sky - Overdrive ebook. YA fantasy with teens from a secondary world attending an English boarding school, undercover, while trying to prepare to overthrow the Evil Empire back in their own world. I liked the characters, and I'm very curious about where the series goes. The library only has book 2 as an audiobook, so I'm on the waitlist for that version.
Tolan, Stephanie. Applewhites at Wit's End - The Applewhite family needs to raise money quick, so they hit on a scheme of hosting a small (and very expensive) summer camp, using their artistic reputations as a draw. The results are mixed. I felt like this book was more of a skeleton of a story than the story itself. Part of that was that the book added half a dozen new characters but kept them flat. The protagonists don't really develop as characters, either. It was all still fun and very Bagthorpe-y, though.
Trevayne, Emma. Spindrift and the Orchid - This is a kids' book, secondary world fantasy. Spindrift is an orphan being raised by her grandfather after both her parents died when their ship went down. She finds a magical artifact with the power to grant certain types of wishes and sets out to find out what actually happened to her parents. The book is about 250 pages and starts slowly enough that I'm not sure the pacing works. I liked the writing otherwise, and the story is a standalone. The artifact ends up kind of One Ring-ish.
Turner, Megan Whalen. Return of the Thief - I enjoyed this one once I got myself to start. I got the paper version from the library and kept eying the size and considering the weight of it. In the end, I had to read in short bursts so that I wouldn't hold any position too long or try to hold the book in my hands for reading. Anyway, this is the last book in a series and really not the place to start the series. I think it ties up a lot of things satisfactorily while still being clear that where the story ends isn't the same thing as where life ends.
Waite, Olivia. The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Overdrive ebook. F/F historical romance. Pining, pining, and more pining. Seriously, ⅔ of the book was pining. Fortunately, I liked the characters and the things they were doing while pining, so I didn't mind too much even though I'm not big on pining.
Started but not finished
Bachmann, Stefan. The Peculiar - Overdrive ebook. Children's fantasy. I read almost half of this, but I found myself out of charity with both POV characters to the point that I resented every word I read. Other readers might not have this issue. I just figured there wasn't much point if I wasn't enjoying it. I need to get better at bailing on books that I'm reacting to like that.
Roberts, Nora. Stars of Fortune - Overdrive ebook. Guardians Trilogy 1. Read the prologue and part of the first chapter and disliked the style. I'd given the prologue a pass on that because it was a prologue and the main narrative might be more congenial, but I didn't find it so. The library has a lot of other books by this author that don't have waitlists, so I don't feel much need to stick with one that's not clicking. Right now, I think I like her contemporaries more than her fantasies. I need to try her mysteries again (I tried the first one before Cordelia was born, and I bounced off it then. Now? Who knows?).
Terrill, Cristin. All Our Yesterdays - I tried this as an audiobook, twice, and kept stopping because I didn't actually care about the twists and turns of the plot. I just wanted to know about the rules the author had chosen for time travel. I also wanted to know whether the time traveling characters were causing the problems they wanted to fix. The answer to the second question was no. Well, mostly no. They'd come back more than a dozen times to try to change things, and their opponents had time traveled more often than that. The answer to the second wasn't explicit, but I think I understood it. The text is very set on the notion that time is sentient and tries to repair itself but doesn't really explain what 'repair' means. I found the ending emotionally unsatisfying, and it needs a trigger warning for suicide that leads to everyone else forgetting everything that happened except for the suicide.
Thakrar, Shveta. Star Daughter - This is well written with some fascinating world building, but I find the idea of magical beings who bestow inspiration just a little creepy. Also, I wasn't feeling very sympathetic to teenage characters, generally, and the book had a waitlist. If I'd had another week, I might have finished; I also might not have.
