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Dog Update: Freya is on such strong painkillers that she thinks she's fine, meanwhile I'm trying to keep a hyperactive three year old gun dog confined to a single room of my house while dealing with all sorts of pet insurance villainy (per condition limits, exclusions, percentage payments). And this is for a non life threatening injury to my dog; I'm beginning to understand why Americans are so tetchy all the time.
She's going in for surgery tomorrow and they're talking about fusing her ankle joint, and then we're onto weeks and weeks of crate rest. Oh boy.
In the meantime I have had this post half written since last week, so lets talk about books, I think I'll find that soothing:
The Secret Loves of Geek Girls - Various
The Bloodprint - Ausma Zehanat Khan
The Storied Life of AJ Fikry - Gabrielle Zevin
The Duchess Deal - Tessa Dare
Lies We Tell Ourselves - Robin Talley
Okay, the first mistake was mine. I saw the title of The Secret Loves of Geek Girls and thought this was going to be an anthology of nerdy women talking about the nerdy things that they geek out over. It was not that. Instead self-identified "geeky" women wrote or drew stories about their romantic lives in various stripes of meh. Look, an anthology where a bunch of women loosely connect by whatever nebulous whatsit talked about their loves lives was never going to do much for me. Judging by my baffled scroll through its glowing goodreads reviews it seems like if this book spoke to you then it really fucking spoke to you. It did not speak to me.
I have really enjoyed Ausma Zehanat Khan's crime novels, so when I heard she was writing a middle east inspired feminist fantasy novel I was super excited to read it. Unfortunately The Bloodprint was... not good. First mistake, if you have a magical group of women called The Oralists and not one of them is a lesbian then I seriously question your life choices. I mean, seriously, the Oralists. The second mistake was the the worldbuilding felt thin. Like, super thin. There was a Wall and a Citadel and an Ashfall Court, but they all felt like they'd been plucked at random out of the Big Bag of Fantasy Cliches and never came together into any sort of cohesive or convincing world. The one sort of, kind of interesting aspect of it, that the bad guys were loosely based on the Taliban (or not so loosely based, given that they're called the Talisman) could have been good villains in the hands of someone who wasn't writing Baby's First Fantasy Novel, but here, nah.
The Storied Life of AJ Fikry is about a widowed bookseller who rediscovers meaning in his life when he adopts the baby girl who was abandoned in his bookstore. If you love books about books, have a high tolerance for twee, and can overlook the fact that that's not how adoption works then the first three quarters of the book are actually lovely. A bit like The Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and what I'd wanted The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend to be earlier this year. Then in the last quarter it changed from a sweet and uplifting love story about second chances to the story of the protagonists death from a rare form of brain and his grieving wife and daughter. Like, holy change of tone, Batman!
The Duchess deal is the first regency romance that I've read this year that I've really properly enjoyed. In it a battle scarred duke and a disgraced vicar's daughter agree to a marriage of convenience, and, of course, ultimately fall in love. It was hot, and fun, and was just what the doctor ordered.
I have bounced pretty hard off Robin Talley's books in the past, but I really loved Lies We Tell Ourselves, a super well-researched novel set in a Virginia high school during desegregation. And far be it from me to want less lesbians, but the relationship between two teenage girls, one white one black, didn't quite hit the mark for me. I couldn't see what the black the girl, Sarah, saw in her love interest, other than the fact that she was maybe not quite so blatantly racist as everyone else at the school.
(This year I've been dipping in and out of various comics trying to work out what I like, and it turns out what I like is Patsy Walker, A.K.A. Hellcat! I read the first two trades, Hooked on a Feline and Don't Stop Me-Ow and I just want to swim around in how perfect for me they were. More like that, please! I also read two trades of the oft recommended Matt Fraction Hawkeye, My Life as a Weapon and Little Hits. And is this why people like MCU Clint, because they think he's this guy? Obviously I can't be impartial about these because of how Clint takes in Pizza Dog after he gets hit by a car, but I'm pretty sure I would have liked them regardless.)
She's going in for surgery tomorrow and they're talking about fusing her ankle joint, and then we're onto weeks and weeks of crate rest. Oh boy.
In the meantime I have had this post half written since last week, so lets talk about books, I think I'll find that soothing:
The Secret Loves of Geek Girls - Various
The Bloodprint - Ausma Zehanat Khan
The Storied Life of AJ Fikry - Gabrielle Zevin
The Duchess Deal - Tessa Dare
Lies We Tell Ourselves - Robin Talley
Okay, the first mistake was mine. I saw the title of The Secret Loves of Geek Girls and thought this was going to be an anthology of nerdy women talking about the nerdy things that they geek out over. It was not that. Instead self-identified "geeky" women wrote or drew stories about their romantic lives in various stripes of meh. Look, an anthology where a bunch of women loosely connect by whatever nebulous whatsit talked about their loves lives was never going to do much for me. Judging by my baffled scroll through its glowing goodreads reviews it seems like if this book spoke to you then it really fucking spoke to you. It did not speak to me.
I have really enjoyed Ausma Zehanat Khan's crime novels, so when I heard she was writing a middle east inspired feminist fantasy novel I was super excited to read it. Unfortunately The Bloodprint was... not good. First mistake, if you have a magical group of women called The Oralists and not one of them is a lesbian then I seriously question your life choices. I mean, seriously, the Oralists. The second mistake was the the worldbuilding felt thin. Like, super thin. There was a Wall and a Citadel and an Ashfall Court, but they all felt like they'd been plucked at random out of the Big Bag of Fantasy Cliches and never came together into any sort of cohesive or convincing world. The one sort of, kind of interesting aspect of it, that the bad guys were loosely based on the Taliban (or not so loosely based, given that they're called the Talisman) could have been good villains in the hands of someone who wasn't writing Baby's First Fantasy Novel, but here, nah.
The Storied Life of AJ Fikry is about a widowed bookseller who rediscovers meaning in his life when he adopts the baby girl who was abandoned in his bookstore. If you love books about books, have a high tolerance for twee, and can overlook the fact that that's not how adoption works then the first three quarters of the book are actually lovely. A bit like The Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and what I'd wanted The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend to be earlier this year. Then in the last quarter it changed from a sweet and uplifting love story about second chances to the story of the protagonists death from a rare form of brain and his grieving wife and daughter. Like, holy change of tone, Batman!
The Duchess deal is the first regency romance that I've read this year that I've really properly enjoyed. In it a battle scarred duke and a disgraced vicar's daughter agree to a marriage of convenience, and, of course, ultimately fall in love. It was hot, and fun, and was just what the doctor ordered.
I have bounced pretty hard off Robin Talley's books in the past, but I really loved Lies We Tell Ourselves, a super well-researched novel set in a Virginia high school during desegregation. And far be it from me to want less lesbians, but the relationship between two teenage girls, one white one black, didn't quite hit the mark for me. I couldn't see what the black the girl, Sarah, saw in her love interest, other than the fact that she was maybe not quite so blatantly racist as everyone else at the school.
(This year I've been dipping in and out of various comics trying to work out what I like, and it turns out what I like is Patsy Walker, A.K.A. Hellcat! I read the first two trades, Hooked on a Feline and Don't Stop Me-Ow and I just want to swim around in how perfect for me they were. More like that, please! I also read two trades of the oft recommended Matt Fraction Hawkeye, My Life as a Weapon and Little Hits. And is this why people like MCU Clint, because they think he's this guy? Obviously I can't be impartial about these because of how Clint takes in Pizza Dog after he gets hit by a car, but I'm pretty sure I would have liked them regardless.)