Queerly Beloved

Back up to six books read for the month!

Awakening Delilah by Abigail Barnette
M/M/F Paranormal (shifter) Romance - ebook novella
4/5

Delilah is a deer shifter, the only shifter in her family. Raised in Boston and told always to keep her "condition" utterly secret, she eventually takes a huge chance: moving to Glenn Close, a community in Michigan's Upper Peninsula dedicated entirely to shifters. It will be the first chance she's ever had to be around her own kind after a lifetime of hiding.
There she encounters Miguel, a wolf shifter, and Darius, a bat shifter. The two rescue her from a close call in the woods, and then all three end up sleeping together. Delilah is sure that this was a one-night stand between her and the couple, but Miguel and Darius feel differently; they're sure that she's intended to be their mate, a third member of their pack.

My thoughts, minimal spoilers:

I enjoyed this one! I think I bought it because I wanted to support the author (Jenny Trout; Abigail Barnette is a pen name) when I was reading some of her entertaining recaps of bad books. This was one that she was excited to get the rights back to, and republished for herself, so I bought a copy, since I like poly romance... but that was years ago, and it took me forever to get around to reading it, haha.
I was struck how similar the setup is to the M/M/F story that I didn't particularly enjoy from a couple months ago. ("Breaking the Rules.") The initial setup could sound almost the same: woman moves to a new area, has a minor crisis, and is rescued by a pair of men more established in the area, who are already connected to each other, and the three sleep together; after, the woman expects it to be a one-time thing, while the men want it to be more. The details were very different, but the broad summary is basically identical! Despite that, the the execution was not especially similar at all, and I think this one was a lot better.
I liked the characters better in this one. This is maybe just personal preference, but while Delilah still has some hangups about her past, her arc is a lot more about wanting freedom rather than escaping shame. (Maybe it's more that the other protagonist's escape from unhappiness also came with a push toward seeking conformity, which is probably really the part I didn't connect with.) I also liked that Miguel and Darius are an established couple, as opposed to the "we couldn't be a couple; we aren't gay! We just fuck sometimes" guys from the other book.
This also did not at all do the "oh no, a threesome is so dirty and wrong and forbidden!" thing. Like, Delilah does think a little bit about how it's a new thing for her, and there's a bit of "what would my mother think!", but not at all the same tone. The setting itself is fairly poly-normative, though I don't recall if there were any other background poly relationships portrayed, though there were other queer background characters. Miguel and Darius talk about how forming "packs" of more than two people is common for shifters (even though the species they shift into are all different).
I found the sex scenes less offputting, too. Fewer descriptions that made me wince, lol.

Lord of Souls by Greg Keyes
Fantasy - physical novel
Book two of a duology set in the Elder Scrolls universe; read with Alex
3.5/5

After their failed attempt to kill the master of Umbriel, Sul and Atrebus are cast back through Oblivion, and must go on a dangerous quest to find a monstrous, possessed sword that may help them succeed the next time. Annaig continues her ruthless climb through the ranks of the chefs of Umbriel, eventually gaining access to the lords. Her desire to entirely destroy the island puts her at odds with her long-time friend, Mere-Glim, who has grown to know and care for the ordinary servants and denizens of the island. Back in Cyrodiil, Colin thinks he has uncovered who is behind the plot both to kill Atrebus and to bring Umbriel into the world.

My thoughts:

Parts of this book felt a little bit more... video-game-y than the last book. (Particularly Atrebus and Sul's part, on their quest for the sword. It felt like a game objective.) This is a tie-in for a video game franchise, so that isn't a complaint, exactly, but parts of it felt like they'd be a better game than a book.
The first book felt a little more cohesive... there weren't really too many new characters introduced in this one, but it felt like the perspectives hopped around more. Annaig, Mere-Glim, Atrebus and Sul, Colin, the orc soldier (Maz Gar? I think she was new to this book, actually)... it's a lot of hopping between them. All of those perspectives added to the whole, but some were definitely more interesting than others, I thought.
I don't think I found anything in this book surprising. It was pretty straightforward in terms of what was happening, who was behind it, how they were going to be stopped, etc. The first book wasn't full of shocking twists, but it had a few: the reveal about Atrebus' reputation and heroism, how Umbriel-the-island was creating its workers, who Umbriel-the-being was before he was Umbriel, etc. In this book it felt like we already knew basically everything, and were just watching it play out the conclusion. It was satisfying to see how all the different characters finally got to interact with each other, though.

Aftermarket Afterlife by Seanan McGuire
Urban fantasy - physical novel
Book 13 of Incryptid; read with Taylor
4/5

Mary Dunlavy, ghost babysitter for the Price family, has been freed from her job as a crossroads ghost, leaving her duty to her family as the only job she has. Unfortunately, The Covenant of Saint George has escalated their attacks on the family and on the cryptids of North America, conducting coordinated assaults on various communities. The only thing the family can do is try to take the fight to them, to make the fight too expensive in terms of loss of life for the Covenant to continue. Mary may be happy as a ghost, but she will do anything she can to keep her family among the living.

My thoughts:

A reread for me, reading it with Taylor. This one is good! I enjoy Mary as a protagonist, and getting her perspective on everything, which is by necessity very different than the living family members'. The fact she's been with them so long lets us get little insights and memories of some of the characters we haven't seen in the series proper, like Fran (Alice's mother, who died young, but would be great-grandmother to most of the protagonists.) This was a much darker entry into the series in a few ways, and a bit of a downer at times. There are deaths, and they are tragic, largely for the ways in which they ended those characters' arcs, the things that will be left unfinished for them, as well as the grief left behind for the other characters. Which is good in terms of narratively making those deaths matter! But it sucks!
It also very significantly escalated the conflict with the Covenant. I said it when I read it last year, but I still appreciated the grappling with revenge and the fact that it's not a morally pure act, even when it's the good guys doing it, and even when it may be the best option there is.

Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco
Fantasy (background f/m/m) - physical novel
3.5/5

Remy is a member of the Reapers, an elite organization dedicated to fighting vampires in the country of Aluria, and he is very good at what he does. Unfortunately, the rest of the organization doesn't seem to agree, allowing political infighting and dislike of his father to affect how they treat him. Vampires Lady Xiaodan Song of the Fourth Court and her fiance Lord Zidan Malekh of the Third Court come to Aluria seeking a peace treaty. Remy is extremely drawn to Xiaodan... and a bit more reluctantly to her fiance, as well. When a bizarre new infection takes hold in the country, mutating its victims into horrific monstrosities, the three agree to work together to find the cause... and to stop the incursions from a group of vampires who are extremely disinterested in anything resembling peace.

My too-extensive thoughts, minor spoilers:

I wanted to love this book, but I couldn't quite get past some of the issues that I had with it, though I did still like it.

Good points:
I did really like the characters and their relationship. I always love poly ships, and canon ones are a joy to me. The characters themselves were all interesting, and I enjoyed their chemistry with each other. They each have their sad backstories, which also interact in interesting ways, and make for good tension. I'd love to keep learning more about all three of them!
It felt a lot like the sort of story I wanted to be able to write when I was a teenager. It reminds me of the sorts of things I'd imagine, now put to page, and that was extremely fun in a lot of ways. Though along with that (and perhaps showing some of the same influences?), this definitely felt like a story and a world where "rule of cool" gets to take precedence sometimes. That isn't a terrible thing, and I was glad it was established pretty early, so that I could read the rest of it with that mindset. Like... Breaker, Remy's super special vampire-hunting weapon, sounds wildly impractical if not impossible to actually use... but it also probably looks cool as fucking hell. Stylistically, it felt like the sort of rad-but-unlikely weapon I'd expect an anime or video game protagonist to have, but I'll willingly buy in because it's cool, even if I don't think it's realistic.
The places where it sort of blends genres are really fun... the setting is a sort of ambiguous historical fantasy, set in a fictional world, but clearly inspired a bit by historical-England-but-with-more-diversity. I thought it really stood out where it bordered on horror, and especially the parts that are essentially mad science. Having parts of the fantasy setting brushing up against in-universe scientific study was interesting. (Emphasis on scientific understanding being something that Malekh was interested in was also a cool aspect of his character.)
I did have fun reading it!

Unfortunately... there were a lot of parts that bothered me. (Mostly clustered in the first half.) The fact that I have so many things to mention here really isn't because I think it was bad... It's more like it was so close to being something that I would have LOVED, I wanted to dig into what kept it from being that.
I really think that most of the issues could have been fixed with stronger editing, both on the copyediting side and the developmental side. While the developmental stuff is more subjective, some of the objective errors absolutely should have been caught by an editor, and it frustrates me how much it seems those standards have dropped in professional publishing.
The parts that bothered me:
A few wrong word uses, which I think an editor should have caught. "It appears we were lapse in our investigation." Not the word you wanted!
There were also multiple incorrect plurals, which again... editing! ("Her hair was so long they brushed the floor behind her throne." There were at least three I noticed within a span of two chapters, but the other one I remember was minorly NSFW (it amounted to "her breasts was...") and I forget the third.) I try not to be TOO pedantic about errors like this, but these are things that should have been fixed, and they happened often enough that it didn't feel like just a random errant typo. It was frequent enough to be distracting.
There were some continuity things that bothered me, too, which I also think a round of editing would have really helped. I'm afraid this sounds like nitpicking, but it's more that these individual things are just examples of a trend that I felt throughout; like the book didn't lean into its own worldbuilding quite enough, and ended up unintentionally undercutting its cool ideas or significant details by not following through on them. (Which I fear is a weakness in my own writing, which may have made my reaction to noticing it stronger, too.)
One was fairly minor: there's a pretty big deal made about Remy sleeping with a noblewoman in exchange for information. She is able to get someone to copy documents that are given to her husband, and then she passes this information along to Remy. But then later, when he's looking at these copied documents, he says he recognizes a specific man's handwriting... The tech of the world would not support this being a photocopy; the implication is that her source copies them by hand, so am I supposed to think that source is accurately mimicking handwriting?? It super threw me out of the exciting intrigue plot.
Another I found confusing... we start with Remy getting a mysterious bit of information from an informant, about a string of killings that he plans to investigate. When he does go look into it, he encounters the first of the Rot-infected creatures, which seems like a big deal. He doesn't know what it is, he's shocked and horrified when he can't kill it, had no suspicion that something like this was the culprit... then they come back to the city, and suddenly it seems like everyone is aware of the Rot. I'll buy it from the Reapers, who are known to withhold information from Remy, but if random civilians are aware of it, he should have been, too. (I was also confused about what the victims of the Rot were supposed to be, since initially it seemed like it was vampires, then no, vampires were actually immune, so it was humans, then yes it was vampires, but only new ones, then maybe it was both new vampires and human victims? I think part of this was the back cover copy inaccurately calling it "a new breed of vampire" and that sticking in my head, so I won't lay that entirely on the writing.)
One other continuity thing isn't an error per se, but threw me off as a reader. We get some exposition about how the First Court—the terrible, evil, and extremely elusive vampires that Remy is personally invested in hunting down—are marked with a tattoo. Then it's explained that it is almost impossible to tattoo vampires (presumably their healing prevents the marks from taking), without one of the Ancient vampires getting their blood involved somehow. That way the characters (and by extension the readers) know the markings are legitimate for identification, since they'd be near impossible to fake. This was a fun detail that I thought was cool! 
A chapter or two later, we hear from an informant that there's a group of vampires killing villagers! They have a distinctive tattoo that the informant doesn't even want to describe! Oh ho, I think, we have our extra evil vampire group sighted! ...but nope. It's an unrelated group of vampires that just also happen to have tattoos, with no explanation given as to why. (It also wasn't even an actual red herring, as none of the characters assumed it was the First Court. But having just established the details about the tattoos, I'm not sure why the characters wouldn't have been suspicious. If it was meant to be hinting at this second group also having connections to an Ancient vampire, I would have expected that to be of interest to one of the characters as well.) Especially coming so close on the heels of the details about the rarity and special-ness of the tattoos, it just felt like it was undermining its own worldbuilding, because apparently that isn't actually a particularly distinct or unique detail after all.
Last bit I want to whinge about: consequences seemed super variable based on what was convenient for the plot. The second time we meet Xiaodan, she uses her special sun-bringer power to rescue Remy, and it leaves her unconscious and incapacitated. After that, they talk about it tiring her, but until [redacted spoiler] it never wipes her out that way again, even when she uses it more often and against bigger/stronger/more targets.
Another example: later in the book, they find out that Xiaodan and Malekh are no longer welcome in Aluria, and it's sort of a cliffhanger to a chapter... But then they have no trouble at all getting into the country. The vampires are turned away when they reach the capital... but the next we hear about them, they're meeting with the queen in the city. This isn't an "error"; I can believe they snuck in somehow, but them being barred from the country seemed like it was going to impede them in some way... and then just was zero barrier at all. It would feel more meaningful if they actually had to overcome the challenges that are set up, rather than just... breezing past them with no evident effort or consequence.

Overall, I did enjoy the book, but I wish so badly that some of the worldbuilding had just been made a little more cohesive. A lot of the ideas are really cool, but then something else sort of contradicts or undercuts them, which was always disappointing.
All that said, I've still added the second book to my TBR, though I don't know when I'll get there!

Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire
Book 7 of Wayward Children
Fantasy - physical novella
5/5

Ever since returning from The Moors, Cora has been haunted by the Drowned Gods she encountered there. They whisper to her from the shadows and in her dreams. They want her back, and the world they offer may be underwater, but it is not the beautiful world of the Trenches, where she was a mermaid. Fearful that their claim on her means she'll never be able to find the door back to her correct world, Cora asks to be transferred to another school, the Whitethorn Institute. This school is dedicated not to helping the children of the doors to make sense of their experiences, but to helping them forget them entirely. They promise that their graduates all become perfectly normal, and ready to integrate into regular society.
The students there are ostensibly there by choice... but it becomes clear that that may not always be true, and that there is something sinister behind the promise to help the students to move on.

My (brief) thoughts:

I really liked this one. I do love me a good evil boarding school. The quote from the school when Cora shows up, "Here, we don't require you to be sure. Here, we're sure enough for everyone." is just skin-crawlingly awful in the best villainous way.
I had enjoyed seeing how Cora got to interact with the Drowned Gods, that whole "something adjacent to the right world, but still wrong" thing, and having that bleed over for her was interesting and I liked it, even though Cora absolutely does not enjoy it in the slightest!
I was glad to see Regan again, our protagonist from the last book.
Fun implied cameo of a cuckoo child (from Incryptid), with a kid mentioned to be certain that they'll escape as soon as they "get the math right."
Overall, it was just a fun story, and the kind of "escaping a controlling evil" adventure that I really enjoy.
While the existence of another school has been mentioned before, it was always fairly neutral in the previous mentions; an alternative option for the students who find their memories of their adventures through their doors distressing or traumatizing, and would prefer to move on to something resembling a normal life. Considering how traumatic some of the experiences in the other worlds can be, that seems like a reasonable thing for some people to want... so finding out that there is something sinister behind that option is something I imagine will become an ongoing arc in the story.

Overgrowth by Mira Grant
Sci-fi/Horror (background m/f) - physical novel
4/5

When Anastasia Miller was a child, she went into the woods and found an alien flower. She never came home, but something that looked like her did. The new Anastasia has never hidden what she is - she is the vanguard of an alien species that plans to arrive on earth, a fact she is compelled to share with everyone she meets.
Even she isn't completely sure that she's telling the truth, and very few of the people in her life truly believe her. Then the signal comes, announcing the approach of the alien armada. Suddenly, people do believe there's an invasion impending, and they do not react kindly to the aliens already hiding among the human race. Stasia herself is torn: are her loyalties with the species she's always actually been, or the world that raised her?

My thoughts, minor spoilers:

I really enjoyed this one! I like Mira Grant (pen name for Seanan McGuire's more thriller/horror work, as opposed to her urban fantasy) and it was nice to have another book from her.
The thing I think I found most impressive, personally, was that I felt like I was going through the same arc as Stasia was, in terms of loyalties, and that was a believable conflict to me. Not that I think that a species that routinely and repeatedly destroys every other species it comes across is a good thing... but I found it was at least presented in a way that made it sympathetic as well. I can't say for sure which "side" I'd come down on were this situation to present itself... but I think ultimately I'd almost certainly make the same choice that quite a few of the human characters do.
(The mild twist, which I won't spoil, about how humans and/or any other species the aliens come to could have avoided their fate was very good, imo.)
I appreciated the ways in which Stasia and Graham complemented each other... while it's not at all a 1:1 comparison, the fact that they bonded over believing each other about their own identities (Stacia as an alien, Graham as a man) was a thing I liked about them.
I also liked that part of Stasia's early thesis about why her species sent infiltrators like her to live among their target species is that they want them to learn to hate the species, and that it is the lesson that some of them end up learning. But later there is the realization that a lot of the aliens, like Stasia, did end up finding relationships and loves within humanity as well, and that the range of emotions matters.
This did not latch onto my hindbrain the way Feed and the rest of Newsflesh did, but I had a good time the whole way through.

I am currently in the middle of four books:
Maeve Fly, my current main read
Buchanan House, my ebook side read
Duma Key, reading with Alex
Installment Immortality, reading with Taylor