Bury Your Gays

Chuck Tingle
Completed 4/5/2025, Reviewed 4/6/2025
5 stars

I read this book because I was intrigued by the title.  “Bury Your Gays” is the slang term for killing off the LGBTQ+ character in fiction, even when they are the hero because of the old, McCarthy-istic, moralistic bullshit that the film industry had to deal with.  That’s what the main character of this book receives pressure from the studio board of directors to do.  It then devolves into a mix of horror and science fiction that is dark, gory, frustrating, and a little fun.  I haven’t read much horror in a while, and though the science fiction isn’t exactly original, it makes for a thrilling ride through the underside of the Hollywood system.  This book was published just last year, so it hasn’t been nominated for any awards yet, though his previous book was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award.

Misha is the successful screenwriter who has just been nominated for an Oscar for Live Action Short.  He is also the creator and writer of a streaming series featuring two Lesbian agents.  It has never been openly discussed in the series, but the sexual tension is riveting, making it a big hit.  His plan is to end this season with them falling in love.  Misha is a semi-closeted gay man, but writes characters that, if not openly gay, have a gay subtext.  However, the board of directors want him to kill off the characters, “for the algorithm,” and introduce a more conservative agent.  He refuses.  Of course, they threaten him with lawsuits for breaking his contract.  More sinisterly, the evil characters from his early horror films begin to haunt and stalk him.  He accedes, agreeing to kill the Lesbians at the season finale, but he is still pursued by these ghosts, aliens, and monsters.  And they are not just threatening him, but his boyfriend, his best friend, and other people in close proximity to him.

This book had a grip on me pretty much from the beginning.  His confrontation with his boss at the studio over killing off the main characters sets up an immediate conflict.  But then when the first ghost shows up and threatens to kill him by pulling out his bones at the end of five days, as in Misha’s first screenplay, things take a terrifying turn.  That period ends at midnight on the night of the Oscar ceremony.  Next, a seven-foot-tall alien wearing the skin of a woman and gives a vision of the meaninglessness of the universe through a single touch stalks him.  The horrors continue and Misha tries to find a way to end this based on the monsters’ characters in his screenplays. I was riveted and little frightened, but also found it a little fun, like a good horror tale.  

Misha was a great character.  He’s smart and witty, even though he’s afraid of coming out completely.  When he’s invited to his high school reunion, he does not take his boyfriend Zeke, which puts a strain on their relationship.  But Zeke is no passing boyfriend.  He believes in Misha’s stalkers even though the studio execs, and of course the press, blow them off as crazed fans.  In fact, the tabloids eat this story up, as people upload videos of his confrontations with the “stalkers” from their phones.  They even spread a story that he’s a serious drug abuser.  But Misha deals with this in his own way as he fights the monsters and gets to the bottom of what sent them.  

In addition, this story is a great coming out tale.  Many of his friends know he’s gay, but keep it quiet for him since in Hollywood, the news can ruin a career.  Through well placed flashbacks, the psychology of why he has such trouble coming out emerges, making Misha deal with his past demons as well as the present monsters.  When he finally comes to full acceptance and comes out, it’s with a glorious bang.

I give this book five stars out of five.  I might be a little overly generous with this since the last horror novel I read with a gay main character was Clive Barker’s “Sacrament,” I think, for which I don’t have a review.  So this book feels outrageously wonderful.  I felt like I was in Misha’s skin as he navigated the horrors of the past and present.  The AI nanobots that come into play later in the book are a common trope these days, but I thought it was done well and quite imaginative.  And the prose sucked me into Misha’s world instantaneously.  I definitely want to read his previous book, “Camp Damascus,” which has even better reviews.

A Sorceress Comes to Call

T. Kingfisher
Completed 3/31/2025, Reviewed 3/31/2025
5 stars

This was an amazing book.  My reason for calling it such is not because of the plot or the world building or anything else technical about the book.  It’s because it so perfectly described the inner working of an abused child.  Cordelia, one of the two main characters, is a fourteen-year-old girl whose sorceress mother has a severe case of narcissistic personality disorder.  Cordelia is just an appendage of Evangeline.  She controls her through a spell of obedience and doesn’t allow her to lock her bedroom door.  Evangeline even causes Cordelia to hurt herself, with the classic lie, “It’s going to hurt me more than it hurts you.”  While it makes for a difficult read, the emotions are real, and that makes this pseudo-regency fantasy that much more profound.  This is a nominee for the 2024 Nebula.  Unlike Kingfisher’s 2023 Hugo winner, Nettle and Bone, “Sorceress” is a much more worthy nominee for either award.  I place this just slightly below Someone You Can Build a Nest In for my choice for the Nebula.

The story takes place as Cordelia turns fourteen.  It begins with a gruesome example of the obedience spell where Cordelia and Evangeline are in church while the daughter is under the spell.  A fly annoys her but she is powerless to do anything to shoo it away since the spell has total control over her body.  I immediately bonded with her, hoping she would find a way to break out of her mother’s control.  Cordelia has only one friend whom she met while riding her mother’s horse, Falada.  The horse is Evangeline’s familiar.  One day, Evangeline announces she is going to be married and will do her best to marry Cordelia into money as well.   The mother finds a way to move into the house of Samuel and his sister Hester, where she proceeds to manipulate Samuel into falling in love with her.   In the meantime, Cordelia lets Hester and a few other ladies in on the fact that Evangeline is a sorceress.  Together, they try to find a way to stop Evangeline from carrying out her plan which seems to grow more nefarious as time goes on.

Besides Cordelia, Hester is the other main character.  The story is told in third person from both their perspectives.  At first it was a little tough to follow, but quickly came together.  Hester is a spinster, having refused engagement to the love of her life, Richard Evermore.  She lives with Samuel on their large estate.  She’s a rather salty older woman.  In fact, when she invites several other ladies to a party at the estate, I could imagine the ladies being played by Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, and a few other grand dames of English film, sitting around, playing cards, throwing shade at each other.  Hester, and her friends as well, are that well developed.  Samuel is rather bumbling and Evermore is typically too polite as an older English gentleman would be.

Evangeline is perfectly nefarious in her behavior toward Cordelia and full of contempt for anyone who might stand in her way.  She’s a three-dimensional character, occasionally showing some humanity and weakness.  Lastly, Alice, Cordelia’s maid in Samuel and Hester’s house, is delightfully normal.  She surprises Cordelia, and us, with her friendliness, care, and spunk.  The family butler also has some personality up his sleeve.  He surprises you, especially during the buildup to the climax.

The prose, as in all of Kingfisher’s books I’ve read, is beautiful.  The details make the characters come alive and the world building thorough.  It’s the little things, like Imogene’s obsessive card playing, that signify the strength of the prose without seeming flowery or filler. I give this book an enthusiastic five stars out of five.  The depth of emotions is profound, wrenching my insides throughout the book.  I was glad this book was short because I don’t think I could have handled the intensity lasting longer than it did.  So this is another book that may not be for all readers if you have triggers by reading about an abused teen.  On the other hand, there is redemption, as a good story would have.  It’s just getting there that may be difficult, unless like me, the pacing grabs you carries you through to the end.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In

John Wiswell
Completed 3/23/2025, Reviewed 3/24/2025
5 stars

Loved this book.  It was a little like Grendl, told from a monster’s POV, but with great dark humor in the beginning which sucks you in.  Then when it gets serious, it’s too late.  You’re hooked and have to see it to the end.  It’s the most original and imaginative book I’ve read in a long while.  It was nominated for a 2024 Nebula Award, having read two nominees so far, this is the one to beat.  

The book begins when a monster, mistakenly called a wyrm, is awakened from hibernation by wyrm hunters.  They’ve found and entered her lair.  The monster, known as Shesheshen, is mostly a blob, but can shapeshift into anything if she has recently eaten something like it.  Shesheshen swallows some bones from her lair and poses as a human girl in a red riding hooded cape 😊 and tries to escape.  She ends up killing and eating one of the hunters, with the other two escaping.  She goes into town in this form, but is spotted by the other two hunters.  When she goes out into town again, she uses the bones from the dead hunter to construct a new body, named Siobhan.  After a series of events, she falls down a ravine.  She wakes up being taken care of by a woman named Homily.  It’s clear from the inuendo that Homily is attracted to Siobhan, who after some deliberation, decides that Homily is a good enough person to build a nest in and lay her eggs.  However, as time goes on, Siobhan starts to feel affection for Homily and a complicated relationship unfolds.  It is marred however, by the family of the eaten hunter who is out to kill the monster, who they say has cursed the family.  

Long plot description, but a lot happens at the beginning of the story.  It is told third person from Shesheshen’s POV, and begins with much dark humor about eating people, the tastiness of marrow, the use of their bones and organs for posing as a human, and the finding of someone to lay eggs who can lovingly let the newborn monsters eat their way out of them for nourishment.  Even when as Siobhan, she starts hanging with Homily, the tentativeness of the development of their relationship is also humorous.  Homily and the monster are wonderful characters.  The monster, of course, because she is naïve about how her appetite for people affects other people, although she has always been careful to only eat people who are banes to society.  Homily is a much more complicated character.  She was terribly abused by her family and doesn’t have any survival skills or defense mechanisms to function as an adult when in any sort of conflict with them.  

It starts to get more serious when the Baroness appears with her two daughters.  It turns out the dead hunter was her son, and now she is on a rampage to avenge his death.  The Baroness and her daughters are pure evil.  They have no redeeming qualities.  I’d say they’re two-dimensional, but I also found them believable.  An abusive mother who has groomed her children to be ruthless, cunning, and entitled like herself.  It’s often hard to read the sections where Homily interacts with them, knowing what a kind person she is from her relationship with Siobhan.  This can be a trigger for some, because the abuse is realistic.  Fortunately, Siobhan has a reasonable understanding of human behavior, having spent most of her life eating those who deserved it.  She comes to Homily’s defense and plots her own way to take out the family.  

I give this book five stars out of five.  It’s shockingly fantastic for a first novel.  I adored Shesheshen and her growing relationship with Homily.  The showdown with Baroness is fantastic, but more interestingly, the epilogue chapters could have started their own sequel.  The prose is wonderful.  The world building simply fantastic.  The characters, all very believable.  I highly recommend this book for anyone with a dark sense of humor and who can handle reading the abuse.

Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory

Yaroslav Barsukov
Completed 3/22/2025 Reviewed 3/22/2025
3 Stars

I’ve started reading the 2024 Nebula nominees and this is the first of the bunch.  It’s a beautifully written novel with lovely prose.  It’s an expansion of a novella previously written by the author.  I had not read the novella so I had no preconceptions about the plot.  The plot is interesting, reminiscent of the arms buildup and one-upmanship between the East and West during and after the Cold War.  One of the antagonists is clearly a stand-in for Putin.  Though not exactly reflective of the international chaos of this specific moment in time, it is still a lesson in authoritarian rule and misinformation.  Unfortunately, I found the book to be less engrossing than many other reviewers on the internet.  My attention varied throughout my reading despite having good, long, uninterrupted concentration on the book.  

Shea Ashcroft was a minister in his own country until exiled for not following the queen’s orders to gas an unruly mob, which Shea’s conscience wouldn’t allow.  He’s sent to a neighboring duchy to oversee the construction of a tower that is both a show of national ego and force.  When he arrives, it is already over a thousand feet high, with more to build.  It is being kept up by devices invented long ago by an immigrant race from another dimension.  However, the details of the devices have been lost.  All they know is that it has anti-gravity properties, allowing for easier construction.  Lena, a woman from the court of the duke, believes that the completion of the tower will bring forth the appearance of a Mimic Tower which will signal the apocalypse.  In the meantime, a neighboring kingdom run by despotic prince in the absence of his father is also building a rival tower.  Shea finds out the truth behind the towers and the other dimension and vows to stop this mad, ego-driven arms race.  

The characterization was pretty good.  Barsukov brings out the tortured past of the main characters, including Shea, in bits and pieces to explain motivation and give them depth.  One thing I didn’t like was that Shea had a sister named Lena whom he often reflected upon.  I found it an interesting parallel to his relationship with the other Lena, but ultimately confusing.  His affair with the other Lena muddled the distinction between the two as he remembered scenes from his childhood.  

Most of the other characters were interesting in various ways.  The dowager queen who was being secretly drugged by her son’s doctors was very well done.  Her meanderings between lucidity and fantasy were tough to follow, but well written.  I felt the frustration of Shea as he tried to coax the truth about her son from her.  At first, I didn’t like the fact that both the prince and the queen’s dog were both named Rudi, but it illustrated her mental state and the frustration in Shea’s search for the truth.  I also liked Brielle, the tower’s architect.  She was very believable with her self-doubts and their historical context.

I was disappointed in the other dimension.  I could only conjure cartoonish images of the giant baby chasing Brielle and Shea and its King Kong-like climbing of the Mimic tower.  I also felt it wasn’t explained well how and why the immigrants from that dimension left it, with only a giant baby remaining.  On the other hand, the treatment of the immigrants by both kingdoms was devastating and similar to the plight of immigrants in our own world.  

In writing this review, I realize that this is one of those where the parts were greater than the whole.  The writing is terrific, which is a hallmark of Nebula nominees.  The world building is meticulous.  The characters have depth and motivation.  The politics of the courts were intense, but did not alienate me.  But ultimately, I felt less than satisfied when I finished the book.  Something was missing, which I can’t readily identify.  Hence, I gave this book three stars out of five rather than the four stars I toyed with throughout my reading.  I would probably read more by Barsukov because his work is very readable and his ideas are pretty original.  

Brothersong

TJ Klune
Completed 3/15/2025, Reviewed 3/15/2025
5 stars

Oh my oh my oh my.  I thought the fourth and last book of the Green River series would simply more of the same.  Well, it was, but it was also so much more.  Not only does it provide a dramatic conclusion to the threats to the Bennett clan, but it is also perhaps the best character study of all four.  This one details the life of Carter, the oldest brother of the family, Beta to his Alpha, little brother Joe, but illuminates the growth and conflicts of a pansexual person.  A pansexual person is attracted to another regardless of gender.  It overlaps a bit with bisexuality which means being attracted to both genders.  Here, Carter, who had always dated women, finds himself falling in love with Gavin, an Omega wolf who is a man.  It explores his own internalized homophobia despite his embracing of his gay brother Joe and his asexual brother Kelly.  It’s also an astounding story of what someone will do for the person they love, even if it means the ultimate sacrifice.  

In the last book, we found that Gavin was the son of the evil witch Robert Livingstone, who has lost all his power but has now become a ten-foot-tall uber-Alpha, and the half-brother of Gordo, the witch for the Bennett pack.  To prevent Livingstone from destroying the Bennetts, Gavin acquiesces to his father’s desire to have him return to him, even though he has been living with the Bennetts for several years, albeit in wolf form.  Gavin finally appeared as a human at the very end of the book as he returns to his father, and breaks Carter’s heart.  This book begins with Carter deciding to go look for Gavin and bring him back to the pack.  He succeeds, but also unleashes the fury of the Livingstone who is now determined to completely obliterate the Bennett pack, wolves and humans alike.  It builds up to a final astounding climax which requires sacrifices for success.

In the previous two books, I thought the internal journey of the main characters took too long, getting a little repetitive here and there.  However, Carter’s journey of love and self-affirmation was so well done, I didn’t mind the length at all.  It seemed natural and necessary.  He struggles with his love for Gavin, never having been in love with a man before.  He’s afraid of the magnitude of his love, that Gavin may never shed his Omega confines, and of course, the mechanics of loving another man.  Yet his love for Gavin is so great, he risks his own return to the feral Omega state by leaving the pack for over a year to search for him.  Then when they return, he struggles with his own demons and doubts just to be able to express his profound love, verbally, emotionally, and sexually.

What I like best about all the books in this series is that the dialogue and first-person narration is so natural.  It reads like thoughts and conversations with real, earthy people.  While the prose is wonderful, it’s the narrative that shines.  I was constantly astounded by word choices appropriate for Carter, as well as all the other characters around him.  And by this book, the number of characters featured has increased greatly.  There’s even a few characters from the town, non-clan, who really shine as well.  The townspeople are also like another character themselves.  By the end of the second book, the people of Green River are told the true nature of the werewolves and the extended Bennett Family.  In the third book, Carter becomes mayor and Kelly the sheriff.  The Bennetts and the townspeople become so intertwined, they become an unofficial part of the clan themselves.  One townsperson, the crochety Will, tells Carter when the latter tries to get them to leave town before the big confrontation with Livingstone, that they won’t.  They will defend the town and the Bennetts.  “You are our wolves.”  It nearly brought a tear to my eye.  

And that’s not to say that tears don’t fall throughout the book.  The steamy scene where Gavin and Carter finally consummate their relationship is just as emotionally devastating as it is exhilarating.  And Gavin’s journey back to humanity, through the eyes of Carter, choked me up a few times as well.  

I give this book five stars out of five.  It’s simply breathtaking.  I give the whole series five stars as well.  As a whole, it’s a masterpiece of world building, mythology, and storytelling.  It’s the best werewolf with gay relationships I’ve ever read.  And I read a fair number several years back when I was curating my LGBTQ+ Resource List for Worlds Without End.  Klune continues to be one of my favorite authors.  While I’ll be taking a break from him to read the Nebula and Hugo nominees as they come out, I look forward to returning to his mind, especially for his series he himself laughingly calls “Shrek erotica.”  And just for reference and linking, the earlier three books in this series were Wolfsong, Ravensong, and Heartsong.

Heartsong

TJ Klune
Completed 3/3/2025, Reviewed 3/6/2025
4 stars

I was surprised by this book.  It follows Robbie, an outsider who joined the pack in the first book.  He was sent by the Alpha of all to spy on the Bennetts, but ended up finding a home there and falling in love with Kelly.  However, something happens to Robbie.  He seems to turn on his new family, then disappears.  This book picks up with Robbie having no memory of the Bennetts and once again working for the Alpha of all and her kindly, elderly witch.  I didn’t think I’d like this turn of events, but I did.  In fact, I loved it.  My only negative comment is that once again, the dissonance of the main character goes on for what I felt was way too long.  This book took me around two weeks to read, not because it was slow going.  Just the opposite.  It was riveting.  However, I was on a Star Trek cruise to the Yucatan and found myself spending more time with the other cruisers than alone with my book.  Oh well.  The cruise was great.  And I can’t wait to start the last entry in this series.

As with all Klune’s books, I just love the prose and the easy dialogue.  It’s so natural, no matter how deep and philosophical it gets.  I feel like I’ve become part of the Bennet family of werewolves and humans coexisting in their unique pack.  I’m actually going to use the characters as inspiration for my next DnD campaign.  😊

Robbie turned out to be a lot more interesting than I thought he’d be.  Before this book, he fell in love with Kelly who turned out to be asexual, and it worked for both of them.  Then he has complete memory loss and becomes indoctrinated in complete hatred for the Bennetts.  He attacks the Bennetts, but they capture him and bring him back to Oregon where they spend most of the book trying to figure out the witchery that caused the memory loss.  Of course Robbie takes a long time believing this and the resolution does not seem clear or easy.  Most of the book is his gradual coming to accept what he’s being told about his real past.  It’s long, occasionally meandering, but ultimately fulfilling.  

The character development of Michelle, the Alpha of all, is noteworthy, as she is basically the bad guy.  There’s also the witch who seems to have Robbie under his spell, Ezra, who seems more like a sexual predator than the mentor he purports to be.  Since Robbie spends a chunk of the beginning of the book with them, the characters are fleshed out well, which is not necessarily usual for the bad guys.  The rest of the pack, including the human members, all continue to develop as well.  Elizabeth’s character is simply wondrous as she mothers, supports, and challenges the pack behind the two Alphas, Joe and Ox.  

I give this book four stars out of five, mainly for the reason I noted above.  Sometimes the angst just goes on a little too long, but the depiction is certainly believable.  What began with a bang in Wolfsong and continued strongly in Ravensong, keeps going here.  The last book centers on Carter, who has his own revelations in this volume, mainly around an Omega who joined the family once the Bennetts broke the spell causing the Omega outbreak.  It will be interesting to see what develops through him to reach what I expect will be an epic conclusion.

Orbital

Samantha Harvey
Completed 2/15/2025, Reviewed 2/15/2025
2 stars

I wanted to like this meditation on space and Earth from the viewpoints of six astronauts in the International Space Station.  It had pretty prose, but not much else.  There’s no plot, just reflections on life in space and sweeping observations as the ISS orbits the Earth sixteen times in one twenty-four-hour period.  And at two hundred pages that should have been right up my alley.  But alas, it was not meant to be.  I could only read about wonder for so long before I got bored and my mind drifted.  At one point, I fell asleep and my e-reader slid back about twenty pages.  When I awoke, it took me about fifteen pages of reading to realize I had already read those pages.  This won the Booker Prize, which is the big book award in the UK.  I’ve only read two other Booker Prize winners, Possession by AS Byatt and Life of Pi by Yann Martel, both of which I loved.  I think Orbital won because it was pretty, and perhaps it could be because it’s a literary tip of the hat to Science Fiction.  Just guessing. 

There’s an interesting narrative that goes along with this book.  Many reviews say that it’s a love letter to Russia and Russian culture.  I didn’t get that.  Two of the astronauts are Russian.  Everybody gets along on the ISS even though they are supposed to remain separated for political reasons.  But I didn’t understand the criticism.  Maybe it’s because I tuned out so many times throughout the book.  Truly, the only character I got any sense of was Chie, the Japanese woman whose mother died that day.  She ruminates on how if her grandfather hadn’t been home from work sick, watching her baby mother while her grandmother went into town shopping, she would have been vaporized by one of the atomic bombs in WWII.  Anyway, back to the Russian criticism, I didn’t see anything that was particularly offensive, even in this time when the Russian dictator and his oligarchs are so brutally trying to obliterate Ukraine.  

I have little else to say about this book.  Despite being pretty, it felt like a waste of time.  Despite being a slim volume, I would much rather have read just about anything else.  I give this book two stars solely for the prose.  It had nothing else of value for me.  

Ravensong

TJ Klune
Completed 2/12/2025, Reviewed 2/13/2025
4 stars

This is the second in the Green Creek series, following Wolfsong.  It tells the story of Gordo, a human who is the witch for the Bennett werewolf clan.  I really liked the form, beginning in the middle of the last book when he and part of the clan went looking for the bad guy for three years.  We didn’t hear much of this story last time.  It fills in the gaps and at the same time, portrays Gordo’s younger years.  At first I was a little disappointed it didn’t follow Ox and Joe, but I became engrossed in his internal struggle with lifelong abandonment issues.  Like all Klune’s books so far, the theme is about family and kinship, love and loss, and it’s wrapped in supernatural action and conflict.  

Gordo’s father was the witch for the clan.  He had his son tattooed with sigils and magical art at a very young age so that he could build his power early.  But it was a horribly painful experience that was the first in a series of betrayals Gordon felt.  Later his mother died and his father left with the bad guys.  Gordo, at a young age, fell in love with the older Mark, the upcoming alpha’s brother.  However, because of the age difference, Mark never let Gordo too close, although he knew they would be mated.  Later, a group of religious fanatic hunters came and nearly obliterated the Bennett clan.  Alone, Gordo apprenticed as an auto mechanic from Marty, who eventually left the shop to him upon his death. Once the Bennett clan reorganized, they left Green Creek so that Thomas, the alpha, could take the role of alpha of all.  Gordo buried himself in his work, eschewing the remaining clan, especially Mark.  Years later, Gordo struggles with his huge resentments against Mark and the Bennetts as the new clan under the leadership of Ox and Joe rebuilds and faces new challenges from the new generation of hunters and an onslaught of magically-diseased Omega wolves.

Yes, another complicated tale.  But it exhibits the complex world building of TJ Klune.  The magic is not exactly well-defined, but it goes hand in hand with Gordo’s understanding of and growth in it.  Specifically, the magically-diseased Omega wolves are the result of ancient magic used by his father to destroy wolves.  Gordo has no knowledge of this magic, but by being genetically linked, his signature has some power.  The book also has several plotlines.  In fact, I felt like the book could have ended several times as each subplot gets some resolution.  It made the book feel a little long, but necessary as the complexity needed to be unraveled and overcome.  

My one real complaint with the book was five hundred pages of Gordo resenting Mark and fighting his true feelings for sooooooo long.  About two-thirds of the way, I was thinking, “Just join a twelve step program already and work through these resentments!”  However, they are also, oddly enough, motivation for Gordo’s defense of the clan as they fend off wave after wave of attack.  When the resolution comes, it’s a little too late, which is nice for a change, not wrapping up neatly.  But Gordo does grow, albeit gruffly.  

I really liked the continued presence, wit, and support of the other humans in clan.  They are mostly his mechanics from the shop and add color to Gordo’s dourness. With the gravity of the plots, they help break the tension with comical exchanges and sharp poignant insight.  Back on the wolf side, Elizabeth, Thomas’ widow and the matriarch of the clan, lends an intelligent and caring presence in her support of Gordo.  

I give this book four stars out of five.  It’s quick, engrossing, and devastating.  Another great book from Klune.  My only reason for not going five stars is the length and intensity of Gordo’s resentment.  It became old after a while, not giving the reader relief until the end.  The conclusion was very satisfying in its eschewing of a happy ending.  It sets the scene for the next book where the clan must overcome more obstacles to make everything right.  Will read the third book after a quick break for a book club book.  

The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy

Megan Bannen
Completed 2/6/2025, Reviewed 2/6/2025
3 stars

This was an okay romantasy which I read for in-person book club.  It’s got zombies, although the nature of the zombies was intriguing.  And it has torrid parts.  However, I thought the torrid parts were rather pedestrian.  Compared to the intense scenes in The Fourth Wing and its sequel, it seems more like a Harlequin romance.  Still, I thought the book was generally entertaining albeit a little soapy.   It has two more books in the series which I probably won’t read.

The story takes place in a universe where the soul resides in the appendix.  Something has happened so that souls don’t go to the unnamed god upon death.  Instead, they wait around and take over a newly deceased body and reanimate it.  There are Marshalls destroy the bodies by disrupting the appendix.  Then the bodies are taken to an undertaker to be prepared for the afterlife.  Mercy is the daughter of an undertaker waiting for her brother to return from undertaking school.  Being a woman, she’s not supposed to run such a business.  However, she loves salting the bodies, reciting the rituals, and building the wooden boats that take the bodies to the afterlife.  Hart is a Marshall.  Since their meeting, Hart and Mercy have hated each other.  

One day, Mercy receives a letter addressed to “A Friend” from the magical owl mail deliverer.  She begins a pen pal relationship with the friend, falling in love with the idea of him.  Unbeknownst to her, the letters are coming from Hart.  Neither knows who the other is, until they try to finally meet.  Craziness ensues.

It’s an interesting take on relationships, although I think it’s been done in other genres.  It’s just that this time, the setting is rather interesting.  The characters are pretty well developed and the prose is not to bad, except for the sex scenes.  I liked Mercy who deals with carrying the weight of the business from her father who had to retire due to a heart attack.  When her brother Zeddie comes back, he’s no help.  He flunked out of the program and finished a degree in liberal arts.  Now he wants to be a cook.  Her sister is pregnant and can’t really help much although her husband is the driver for the company.  So Mercy is between a rock and a hard place.  

Hart on the other hand is the stereotypical brooding loner.  He is assigned a partner, a very young man with no experience hunting the zombies, called drudges.  He resents being assigned a partner but does take him under his wing rather reluctantly.  The young man, Pen, is actually more interesting, acting as a foil for Hart.  In a great little side story, he starts dating Mercy’s brother Zeddie.  

The book was a relatively fast paced book.  It took a little time figuring out the universe, though.  But I zipped through the last hundred or so pages in no time.  I thought the book in general was predictable, yet the ending was well-done.  The star of the book though is the setting and the mythology.  There’s just enough description of the old gods and the new gods and the migrating souls to keep you somewhat engaged.  

I give this book three stars out of five.  It’s good, just not good enough to pull me into the whole trilogy.  In addition, I’d rather read Rebecca Yarros for straight romantasy, or gay romantasy, like the early works of TJ Klune, which I will return to now that I’ve finished this book.  

Wolfsong

TJ Klune
Completed 1/26/2025, Reviewed 1/27/2025
4 stars

I just love TJ Klune.  I had the pleasure of reading his most recent novel Somewhere Beyond the Sea towards the end of last year.  This year, one of my challenges is to read a bunch of his back catalog.  This book is the first of the Green Creek series.  It has recently been republished by Tor, as it was originally either self-published or published by a small indie house.  Anyway, I loved this book.  It’s a gay werewolf romance that includes themes of family, love, and acceptance.  Like all his later books, there is something warm in reading his books.  They celebrate positive queer representation in the characters.  In addition, the characters were well developed and the world building was terrific.  It’s almost like he did research on real werewolves to produce the mythos here.

The plot is rather complex.  Ox’s father left when he was young.  He reinforced that Ox was slow and that people would shit on him his whole life.  When his mother came close to losing the house, he got a job at the auto repair shop that his father worked at.  The owner there helped him and his mom out.  When Ox was sixteen, he met a ten-year-old boy who immediately attached to him.  Turned out he was the son of a pack of werewolves.  He is the alpha heir, training with his dad to take over when the day comes.  Joe, the boy, draws Ox into the family.  Soon Ox and his mom become part of the pack even though they are still humans.  Back story on Joe:  he was kidnapped and tortured by an evil werewolf.  Joe’s father imprisoned him magically, but now, years later, the evil one escapes and is searching for Joe and his family.  

Ox is an awesome character.  He starts out the slow-witted, quiet boy that his father reinforced in him.  But once he meets Joe and joins the pack, he begins to grow, gaining confidence, albeit slowly.  Ox is the narrator of the story as well, so we have an in depth look at the inner development that happens.  

The others in the pack are also terrific.  I was surprised at how much personality Klune was able to inject in each of them.  We know Joe the most, of course, as his relationship with Ox is intense.  As they grow up, they become very attached.  When Joe is seventeen, Ox realizes they are attracted to each other at an incredibly deep level, but only now figures out it is sexual as well.  He also discovers that Joe has chosen Ox to be his mate, an unprecedented thing as Ox is still human.  In addition, Ox is terrified of his feelings because Joe is not yet eighteen and there is a six-year age difference between them.  This may give some readers some pause, but the relationship is handled very well.  Nothing happens for three years, during which time half the pack, led by Joe, leaves to search for the bad werewolf and his gang.  

The one issue I had with the book was that I thought the emotional suffering that Ox goes through when Joe and part of the family leaves went on for way too long and way too intensely.  It was often hard to read Ox torturing himself inside over the events surrounding Joe’s leaving.  The book is just over five hundred pages and it seemed like the whole last third of the book was anguish Ox felt over Joe’s absence.  However, it does illustrate the bond of the wolf pack and the connect between Ox and Joe, as well as with other members of the pack.  And of course, I’m leaving out a lot of spoilers that explain why the feelings are so intense.  I just felt it went on too long.  

There are so many other characters that were really well drawn, including Joe’s parents, his brothers, Ox’s mom, the owner of the auto shop and the small group of mechanics, and the girl Ox dates briefly before he realizes the true nature of his relationship with Joe.  Even the bad wolf and his associates were multi-dimensional.  Klune somehow breathes life and personality into all his character creations.  

I give this book four stars out of five.  I knocked it down one star because I grew tired of being inside Ox’s anger and anguish.  Otherwise, I just loved this book.  I’m so excited to read the remaining three books in the series, which I’ll be doing in between my book club selections.  

Locklands

Robert Jackson Bennett
Completed 1/20/2025 Reviewed 1/21/2025
2 Stars

I didn’t care for this last installment of the Founder’s Trilogy.  I really liked Foundryside, the first book.  I thought Shorefall was kind of meh.  This one was a slog to get through.  It had action, it had tension, it had a plot, but I was tired with it within a hundred pages.  It took me over two weeks to finish.  It had no humor in it, even though Clef was back.  There were some new characters who I didn’t understand.  And I feel like the trilogy fell into the familiar format of Book 1: Save the world; Book 2: Really save the world; and Book 3:  OMG, SAVE THE WORLD!

The book picks up eight years later.  It begins with our characters in a fierce battle.  Almost immediately, one dies.  Berenice feels responsible.  Then our gang finds out that Trevanne is trying to find a way to destroy and reset the world.  So they set on a quest to find and stop them.  This takes them on progressively more dangerous missions as they try to get close to Trevanne while outsmarting them.  In the meantime, Clef goes on a painful journey of self-discovery of his past through visions.  He starts to put together what happened before he became a key, and how that relates to the current chaos.  In the meantime, Sancia and Berenice, who married eight years before, must consider the sacrifices they must make to make sure that Trevanne is defeated.

One of the big things I didn’t like about this book was the magic system.  The major form is scriving, and there’s a subclass of scriving called twinning.  Scriving is a way to give something powers or convince something it is not what it is.  Twinning entails creating duplicates so you can hide an original something.  People aren’t supposed to twin.  In Shorefall, Sancia and Berenice twinned so that they were able to communicate telepathically.  In this book, everyone was twinned.  Hence, most of the dialogue was telepathic.  And with the scriving, all the battles became battles of getting enough scriving done to change the way things were happening.  I found it often confusing and rather tedious.  So rather than enchanting us with the magic like in the first book, I felt overloaded by the magic.

I also would have liked Sancia to remain the main point of view character.  Instead, it was Berenice.  I like her, but I think after two books where Sancia is the POV, I would have adapted easier to this book if she remained as such.  However, the switch did make for a much more dramatic and intense end.  The end and the epilogue were actually quite well done.  It was the one time I wanted to keep reading.  

One thing I didn’t quite get were the characters of Design and Greeter.  It seemed like they were entities composed of many people who had given their consciousness to one central sense.  It was not like the hosts enslaved by Trevanne, but a voluntary thing.  Why people would do that, I never figured out.  Later in the book, one of the secondary characters joined Design, which perplexed me.  And I didn’t get how they physically interacted with the main characters.

I give this book two stars out of five.  I was really disappointed at how disinterested I was with it.  Nothing really grabbed me until the end, and at well over five hundred pages, it took much too long for the end to come.  I have one of Bennett’s Shirley Jackson Award winning horror novels as well.  One of these days, I’ll get around that.  Hopefully, it will be more like a first novel, being a standalone.

Somewhere Beyond the Sea

TJ Klune
Completed 1/2/2025 Reviewed 1/3/2025
5 Stars

My goodness!  I am so loving Klune’s work.  Everything I read by him just seems amazing.  My hopes for this sequel to The House in the Cerulean Sea were not so high.  But as I read, I gently returned to the island where Arthur and Linus raise the magical children in a healthy environment, as opposed to the dastardly wishes and actions of the government.  It is a worthy sequel to its predecessor. I loved this book.  

The book opens with a jump back to when Arthur first returned to the island orphanage where he was abused as a magical child by a horrific headmaster, meets Zoe the island sprite, and begins rebuilding the house as a safe place for magical children.  Then it jumps to the present, where Arthur and Linus are raising the children we met in the first book.  All seems well, until Arthur is summoned to appear at a hearing about the welfare of the children.  He is informed there will be an on-site investigation.  The investigator is not like Linus.  Instead she seems determined to take the children away.  Arthur and his family do everything they can to throw a wrench into her investigation, but she is ruthless.  And it is not enough, leaving Arthur and Linus as well as Zoe and her girlfriend Helen to try to find a way to turn the tide of the government’s abusive practices on magicals.

It's hard to review a book when enamored with everything about it.  I loved the main characters, of course.  But even the baddies from the government agency are multidimensional, showing cracks in their cool, evil exteriors that make you, and them, see their humanity.  And the messages the book conveys are so good, too.  Like the quandry of what to do when confronted with hate.  Lucy, the seven-year-old Antichrist, most specifically has to deal with his desire to just send the bad people straight to Hell versus everything that Linus, Arthur, and the other children have taught him.  Another is the embracing of problematic words.  A new child, David, is a yeti and wants to be known as a monster even though that word is discouraged by the family because it is used as an offensive slur.  It’s similar to the embracing of the word queer in the LGBTQ+ community, taking the power away from it and making it something beautiful.  

I think this book is a little more philosophical than the first, with more discussions between Arthur and Linus with the children.  But it’s hard to notice when the discussions are so playful and healthy.  However, like the multidimensionality of the bad people, Arthur and Linus are not just angelic goodies.  They, especially Arthur, must keep their cool despite the inner desire to lash out.  Arthur must deal with his magical side, as a phoenix, which threatens to give the government the excuse it needs to remove the children from Arthur and Linus.  

I just can’t say enough wonderful things about this book.  I loved the writing, the dialogue, the action, the development of the children, and so many other things.  Klune’s books are simply cozy reads despite the conflicts that move the plot forward.  One of my goals this year is to read some of his earlier catalogue, which has recently been republished.  I realize earlier works may not be up to par with his newer works, but I’m willing to take that chance.  I give this book five out of five stars.