Tag: book reviews

#REVIEW: Cursed Daughters, by Oyinkan Braithwaite

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This is going to be one of those reviews where I talk more about myself than the book, so … brace yourself, I suppose.

I frequently make snap decisions about books. I learn of their existence and thirty seconds later money has left my bank account and a couple of days later I have a book. The problem comes when I don’t read that book immediately, and it gets worse when it sits on my Unread Shelf for four months.

(There are two books on that shelf that have been there longer. Soon. I swear.)

I have no idea why I purchased Oyinkan Braithwaite’s Cursed Daughters. No idea if someone recommended it to me, if I came across the author on BlueSky and decided I liked her … nothing. And by the time I got to it, I’d also completely forgotten what the book actually was. See, that cover kinda yells “fantasy” at me? And the book has the same physical format and size as every hardcover YA book I’ve bought for years. And note the “from the author of” at the bottom. Come on! You’re telling me My Sister, the Serial Killer somehow isn’t genre fiction??

Cursed Daughters is not a fantasy novel and it is absolutely not YA. It is, in fact, hated Litratcher.

It’s fucking brilliant.

I keep saying this, over and over: you should read more books by Nigerians, goddammit. The book scene out of Nigeria is amazing right now.

This is the second time this year I’ve had to apply the word “brilliant” to a work of genreless Literary Fiction. I remain salty about it. Because this is the only book I’ve read this year that came close to Tom’s Crossing. I need the swords and lasers and magic contingent to step up their damn game, is what I’m saying.

At the beginning of the book a Nigerian woman intentionally walks into the ocean to die. The same day, her cousin Ebun gives birth to a daughter. The baby resembles the dead woman, Monife, to such a degree that Monife and Ebun’s mothers immediately decide that the baby is Monife reincarnated. Ebun is … unconvinced, and frankly quite a bit upset by the entire thing. There is also the minor matter of a generations-old family curse, that no woman of this family can be happy in love.

It’s still not a fantasy book. There’s some traditional beliefs mixed into a book set in the modern day in Lagos, and there’s a juju woman as a minor side character, but it’s not a fantasy book. Ebun believes none of this nonsense, and her daughter Eniiyi wants nothing to do with it either, but has to live her entire life in her dead semicousin’s shadow. She dreams of Monife occasionally, and by the end of the book genuinely resents the effect on her life that this woman she’s never met has. She remains Monife’s spitting image, so when she occasionally runs into people who knew Monife she either provokes shock or is genuinely thought to be a ghost. And as her great-aunt gets older, she begins regularly mistaking Eniiyi for Monife, and eventually her dementia increases to the point where she forgets Eniiyi exists at all.

The book follows three generations of the family, with Ebun and Monife in the middle, and jumps back and forth from the nineties to modern day. You eventually learn why Monife chose to walk into the water, and I’m not going to spoil anything but God damn does it end well— like, “I gasped and had to put the book down for a minute” well. I started this yesterday afternoon, read a chapter or two and put it down. When I picked it up again in bed last night it cost me at least an hour of sleep, and I got home from work today and sat down in my chair and didn’t get up again until I finished it.

Absolutely phenomenal work. I ordered My Sister, the Serial Killer about ten minutes ago. It’ll be here tomorrow. Oyinkan Braithwaite is on my “buy immediately” list forever now, and I’d really like to know what the circumstances were that brought this book onto my radar. If it was you, thank you very much.

#REVIEW: Of Mountains and Seas, by Emily Renk Hawthorne

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Let us take a moment to appreciate this cover, while I collect my thoughts, because I am about to write a review of this book and I’m still not 100% sure what I think of it. So I’ll start with the bit I’m most enthusiastic about, which is that if you’re going to buy this book, get the hardcover, because the paper and the cover feel absolutely amazing in the hand and it looks awesome and it’s somehow less than $10 on Amazon right now. Which … hell, less than $10 for this book may push me into enthusiastic recommendation regardless of whatever else I might think about it.

I was contacted by Emily Renk Hawthorne’s publicist and offered an advance copy of her forthcoming novel From the Depths. That book sounded up my alley, but I hadn’t read the first novel in the series yet, so she went ahead and sent me Of Mountains and Seas, with the idea that I’d read that first and then see if I wanted to read From the Depths as well. I sent a follow-up email at about the 3/4 mark of OM&S asking her to go ahead and pull the trigger on the second book. And this is the part where I want to stare at the screen for a bit, because my opinion on this book is genuinely mixed, but one way or another it’s definitely positive enough that I still want to read the sequel.

Let’s start positive: Of Mountains and Seas is a nicely complicated little novel, with multiple POVs stretched between 1932 or so and the near-present. Parts of the book are set in 1932, 1935, 1936, 1955, 1985, 1990 and 2000, with 2000 being the “now” of the book, and shut up, 2000 is so the “recent” past. There may be another couple of years sprinkled in here and there but that’s good enough for now. There are at least half-a-dozen POV characters, some of whom appear in multiple time periods and some of whom are young enough that we only really see them toward the end of the timeline. Some of them change their names partway through! It can be kinda rough if you’re not paying attention, to be honest. The main thrust of the story is that most of the characters are Shifters, shapeshifters who also possess other magical abilities, almost, but not quite, X-men style— all of them can change shape but some can manipulate rock or affect memories or various other things, and there are also a handful of magical tinctures and other objects as well. Where’s the book set? California, of course, so mostly in the real world. Shifters have their own government set up— indeed, one of the characters is running for office for part of the story— and take careful pains to avoid being noticed by the humans, who they call Statics.

Davis, one of the more important POV characters, is born to a Shifter family, but without powers. This leaves him as an exile within his own family. And then he discovers that special stones exist that will allow him to steal abilities from other Shifters, leaving them powerless (there are also special marks that can be etched into a Shifter’s skin to take away their powers, by the way) and temporarily transferring their powers to him. “Temporarily” can mean for decades or for a much shorter period of time, depending on how powerful the Shifter he stole from was and how often he uses the abilities. At any rate, that kicks off the story, as Davis goes on to make a whole lot of trouble with these stones. Oh, and he also finds a mine full of them.

On a story level, the book is pretty cool. I may actually reread it before I read the sequel; it’s fast, and there’s enough going on that I suspect I’ll need the refresher.

Unfortunately, Emily Renk Hawthorne is one of those writers who consistently violates Twain’s thirteenth rule of writing: Use the right word, not its second cousin. Opening the book to a random page, I see her use pretense when she means pretext. Opening to another, I see someone use the word apparently to describe someone losing a hand, which is not a word someone would use in this particular context. She definitely lost her hand! It’s not there! On the opposite page from that, we have a clunky bit of dialogue where someone reads a cop’s full name to them off of, specifically, their badge. First, you would not say “Thank you, Officer… Brad Smith,” because that’s not how people talk. Second, their badges don’t have full names. Police badges don’t have names at all, in fact! His name may be on his chest somewhere, but it’s almost certainly his rank and last name and maybe a first initial, and that’s gonna be it. There’s lots of stuff like this, lots of little violations of logic and words that are 90 degrees away from being the right word for the context. This will bother some of you more than others. It’s the same exact problem I have with Ryan Cahill, actually. And, interestingly, I begin a review of one of his books by praising the book for the exact same physical things I just praised Hawthorne’s about. I wonder if they used the same printer?

At any rate, this book could have used a bit more editing, so your enjoyment of it will depend directly upon how much the good story distracts you from the less-good writing. I went back and forth; I barely noticed any issues with the first half of the book, then there was one particular chapter that was riddled with problems, and after that I either got a lot more critical or the book got sloppier because I started noticing stuff all over the place. Again, I’m in for the sequel even if I end up having to buy it myself, I’m just hoping for a slightly stronger sophomore effort on the prose front.

#REVIEW: The Door on the Sea, by Caskey Russell

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I’ve not had any diversity-related reading goals for several years now, but that doesn’t mean I’m not constantly on the lookout for books by authors from underrepresented groups, so when The Door On The Sea was represented to me as “a Tlingit Lord of the Rings” I bought it damn near immediately. And, in the way of such things, it perhaps lingered on my Unread Shelf for too long— most books linger on my Unread Shelf for too long nowadays— but now that I’ve read it, I’ve pre-ordered the sequel, and it’ll be devoured quickly once it shows up.

Forget the Lord of the Rings comparison, by the way; the books have little in common other than being journey-focused and party-based fantasy, and Door mostly takes place in an outrigger canoe rather than on foot and horseback, and there’s a clearly identifiable main character instead of LOTR’s omniscient third person. There’s a shapeshifter and a foul-mouthed talking raven, though, and that’s cool.

The main character is Elān, a young Storyteller— basically a bard and a scholar— who is dispatched along with several warriors to recover a lost weapon belonging to an immensely dangerous invading enemy race called the Koosh, who are posing a threat to everything and everyone Elān knows. If you’re wondering why a bard might be put in charge of such a journey, don’t worry; Elān is too, and everyone constantly questions his leadership despite him ending up being fairly level-headed and good in a tight situation. Elān is the grandson of a legendary warrior and he secretly wishes to be a warrior himself, but the others on the journey with him constantly call him a Bookeater, which seems to more or less be warrior slang for “nerd” despite being an objectively badassed thing to be called. It’s not entirely clear what the Koosh are; sometimes they come off as basically orcs, but they may actually be from another dimension, and the one Koosh that gets some dialogue and page time turns out to be really fascinating. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes here, and I’m really looking forward to learning more about this world in future books. This isn’t exactly a YA novel, but there’s definitely some coming-of-age stuff going on with Elān and his youth and inexperience and, well, softness are an ongoing theme in the book.

Speaking of “a lot going on,” the book is told in the style of an oration around a campfire, and there are even some hints that the teller— probably not Elān, but who knows— knows that people on Earth in 2026 are reading the book. I can’t find the passage to quote it directly, but there’s a bit where the narrator refers to an animal by its indigenous name, then a brief aside something along the lines of “in your world, you’d call it a moon jellyfish,” which … well, I also don’t know what a moon jellyfish looks like, but whatever.

A quick word about the language in the book; you may have noticed that diacritical mark on Elān and wondered how it was pronounced, and unfortunately I have to tell you I haven’t the slightest idea. Russell doesn’t hold anyone’s hand with spelling, and there’s no pronunciation guide in the book. On top of that, there are diacritical marks in this book that I’ve never seen in any other context, and I feel like I probably have more experience with languages than a lot of people do. There’s a character named Snaak, for example, and yes, that K is underlined on purpose, and I don’t know why. Or, just to pick a couple more words, xaax’w or ax xoonx’iyán, which means silence-sharing friend, or Kusaxakwáan, which is the land of the cannibal giants. Yeah, there are cannibal giants. They may not be cannibals, though. There’s a whole thing. Word meanings are always clear from context, but man, I feel like the audiobook narrator might have gone through hell on this book, and I almost want to listen to it just to find out how to pronounce some of this stuff.

One way or another, though, big thumbs up. Check this one out.

#REVIEW: Tom’s Crossing, by Mark Z. Danielewski

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Buckle in, as this is going to be a bit meandering, but you’ve no doubt read my book reviews before and know to expect some degree of that, and frankly “a bit meandering” is a fair description of large parts of Tom’s Crossing anyway.

We’ll start with this: I bought this book out of spite. I don’t know anything about Mark Z. Danielewski as a person; as far as I know he has no social media presence, or at least I’ve never encountered anything from him, and I’ve never read an interview or anything like that. My only previous knowledge of his existence was from his book House of Leaves, a book I have never read and I kind of hate. The reasons I hate House of Leaves are probably not something I need to go into too deeply for this post, but I will give some brief notes:

  1. That the word “House” is supposed to be in blue; note that that is the case where the book is mentioned on the cover of Crossing up there.
  2. That the book frequently has blocks of sideways text;
  3. That the book’s fandom is excessively incel-coded and are very much the type of people who will recommend House of Leaves to you no matter what kind of book recommendation you have asked for. Dark fantasy? Have you read House of Leaves? Potboiler romance? Try out House of Leaves. 1940s etiquette manual? Let me tell you about House of Leaves.

These three things combine to make this book a big nope for me even if I might like it otherwise. I particularly refuse to read it because reading it might, somehow, make one of its fans happy, and I don’t want to do that.

A second thing: I like big books and I cannot lie. I currently have three other 1000-plus page books on my TBR, and at 1,232 pages I am pretty certain that Tom’s Crossing is the longest book I have ever read— Brandon Sanderson’s Wind of Truth has more pages, but the text on Crossing is smaller and denser and I’m pretty sure the wordcount is significantly higher. I saw this book in Barnes & Noble, thought “Oh, shit, Mark Danielewski wrote a new book,” then made the mistake of picking it up and noting the length and all the sudden I owned it. It is possible that I bought this book out of some bizarre need to stick it to House of Leaves, which is an inanimate object and does not have feelings.

This, an excerpt from page 34, is what you should expect from the prose in Tom’s Crossing. Yes, I read this on my Kindle; I bought the hardcover and then checked the book out from the library, because I’m not holding that huge fucking thing in my hands for twelve hundred pages.

Note a few things:

  1. There is not a single gerund in the book that ends with -ing. The g is dropped on every single one, including gerunds that are nouns; this book is very concerned with horses, and the word “geldin” really got on my nerves for some reason.
  2. Excessively long sentences. There are only nine sentences on this page, and sentences that take up entire pages or the majority of one are far from uncommon.
  3. That the narrator is the most highly-educated hick in the history of Utah. The dialect leads you to expect a certain kind of prose and then the book hits you with at least gettin a taste of a place where the bonds of birth and fortune have loosened their hold.

I rather expected to hate this book, to be honest, and I was hoping to hit something objectionable enough within the first couple hundred pages that I could put it down. By page 34 I was griping about it on a Discord I’m a member of. Around page 75 the language clicked.

This is one of the best fucking books I have ever read, and guys, I am so salty about that.

I am normally a Story Guy. I am a Setting Guy. I am rarely a Character Guy and even more rarely am I a Prose Guy. The story for Tom’s Crossing is serviceable but simple— it’s a Western, and it involves fulfilling a final promise to a dead friend by freeing two horses that are destined for slaughter. The main character is a teenager named Kalin, and his friend Tom tags along with him for most of the journey despite being dead. Tom’s sister Landry also comes along; she is not dead, at least most of the time. (Nearly every character in the book spends some time being dead, for the record.). Along the way the two get framed for a murder by the wealthiest family in town, the Porches mentioned in the above excerpt.

The setting? Sort of Utah, although it’s not our Utah, and the now of the book is also sort of the future, I’d estimate around 2045 or so, although the story being told is set in late October of 1988. Why is it not our Utah? Well, there’s some simple stuff, like there being a town in our Utah named Provo but none named Orvop, which is where the book is set, and then there’s weirder stuff like renaming Joseph Smith to Joseph Mith, which I thought was a typo for a while until it kept happening. Many of the book’s characters are Mormons, as you might expect from a book set in Utah, but the word “Mormon” is never used, although there is some criticism of The Church toward the end of the book. (Danielewski is not a Mormon, but apparently spent a good chunk of his youth in Utah.)

Also, when things that feel like specific references to Mormonism come up, they’re often changed too, beyond just the Joseph Mith stuff. The angel Moroni is renamed, and there are occasional scriptural references to books that don’t seem to exist. I actually went and found my copy of the Book of Mormon to check a few of the references; they aren’t in there, I swear.

Also, it appears that everyone in the world is fully conversant with all of the events in the book, even the ones that they would have had to have been present for; the book frequently cuts away to provide comments from random other people like the Reed Beacham mentioned above. Adding to the weirdness, nearly every time one of these random people is brought up, the book mentions how they died.

I also have the feeling that if I knew the Iliad and the Odyssey better I’d have picked up on some stuff. It’s been a while since I read either. This isn’t some kind of clever conjecture on my part; there is at one point a several-page conversation between three people about which characters in the book line up most precisely with characters from the Iliad. The book interprets itself. It’s nuts.

It’s the prose, y’all. I could bathe in this book’s language. About once every page or two Danielewski will hit you with a sentence or a phrase that will literally stop you in your tracks with its beauty. It’s 1200 pages long and I read it in eight days, during most of which I was also tearing apart my house.

I suspect I’m not quite smart enough to fully appreciate what’s going on in this book, to be honest. There’s a reason I make fun of Litratcher so often around here; I dislike pretentiousness in general, and while I’m very much not a The Curtains Were Blue guy, I also like my narratives nice and straightforward. I am not, as I frequently admit, the world’s most careful reader, and in fact the speed I read at frequently hurts me on more complex books. But, God, once this one had me, it had me, and I’m so glad I didn’t cave to my baser instincts and put it down after the first 40 pages just so that I could say I’d tried.

The worst thing? I think I might have to read House of Leaves now. And there is literally no higher praise that I can imagine giving to a book than that it made me decide to read House of Leaves.

#REVIEW: Slewfoot, by Brom

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I picked up Brom’s novel Slewfoot more or less on a whim— I know him from his comic book work, but was unaware that he’d written any books until finding this one on a table at Barnes & Noble. That cover is haunting as hell (an apt description for most of his artwork, to be honest) and the book actually has an insert of several full-color paintings of the main characters, plus smaller pieces of artwork adorning each of the chapter headings, so I figured even if the writing itself wasn’t that good I would be getting some cool artwork out of the deal.

Well, I’ll be picking up more of his books, now that I know they exist. Slewfoot is not the most original book ever written— when I tell you the main character is a woman in Puritan Connecticut during the 1600s, combined with the cover and the subtitle “A tale of bewitchery,” you will no doubt be able to map out a lot of the broader beats of the story all by yourself with little effort, and you’ll mostly be correct. Is religious intolerance a theme? Yep. Is there a group of men whose goal is to fit main character Abitha into a box that she doesn’t want to be in? Yep. Will there eventually be a trial scene where she is accused of witchcraft, and the accompanying scenes of torture and interrogation? Yep.

(She doesn’t have goat legs, by the way. At first.)

Because, of course, the next question is going to be “Did Goody Good see her with the devil,” and the answer’s going to have to be sort of. Abitha’s husband dies early in the book and her shithead of a brother-in-law immediately starts to try to steal her farm out from underneath her so that he can pay off his debts, and, yeah, there’s something in the woods, but is it The Devil with capital letters? It certainly doesn’t seem to be. And Abitha has certain talents and skills learned from her mother, a cunning woman in her own right, and certainly not a Puritan— in fact, Abitha herself wasn’t born a Puritan, and in fact appears to have been more or less sold to her husband as the seventeenth-century version of a mail-order bride.

So she’s an outsider, too, in addition to all the other stuff, and, well, that’s not entirely a new idea either.

This book, in other words, isn’t necessarily good because of what it’s about, because as soon as you say Puritan you’re automatically conditioned in this country to expect a certain kind of story, and you’re going to get more or less what you’re expecting. Right up until the goat-legs thing, at least. And the bloody, bloody revenge. But there’s room for something to be reasonably predictable while still being a really good example of the thing that it is, and that’s what this is. Yeah, this is a book about a sort-of-but-not-really witch who is mostly just a woman with her own mind and her own opinions, in a world where all of those things are strongly frowned upon, and we’ve read that before. But I like genre books for a reason, and originality isn’t everything, and this is a really good seventeenth-century horror story, stuffed full of cool art as a bonus. It’s well worth checking out.

#REVIEW: The Black Hunger, by Nicholas Pullen

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With about fifty pages left in Nicholas Pullen’s The Black Hunger, I showed my wife how much book was left and told her that there was no way the book had enough book left to end right.

I was wrong.

Real, real, real wrong.

Now, obviously I can’t spoil the book’s ending. I mean, I can; I’m not going to. But it makes the book kind of hard to talk about, because having read the ending, I now feel like it’s the only possible way that the book could have ended, and to be honest I feel kind of dumb for not having seen it coming. But God damn, Nicholas Pullen. My dude pulled an inside straight here, and I’m genuinely in awe of how this book is put together.

But before I get too far ahead of myself: The Black Hunger is a whole lot of things. It feels very neo-Lovecraftian despite not actually referencing any of the Lovecraft mythos; it’s somehow cosmic horror without quite being properly cosmic; it’s historical fiction, referencing real people and real events, right up until the point where it isn’t. There is, at one point, a story within a story within a story. It’s gory and supernatural and Gothic and super gay. I was already thoroughly enjoying myself even before finishing the book, and the last ten pages or so are a masterclass. It starts off at Oxford and wends its way through India, Tibet, Russia and China before it’s finished. Pullen even throws in an 1870s British paranormal spy agency and the Dalai Lama just for the sheer hell of it. The main character is an academic and a minor British lord who ends up in the civil service in the back-end of India just because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

In a move that really shouldn’t have worked and somehow did, the middle third or so of the book is a lengthy letter involving an entirely different set of characters that also itself includes a lengthy digression for another letter.

This, uh, appears to have alienated some people, from looking at the reviews, and the rest are mad that there is Gay. Do not trust Goodreads on this one, is what I’m saying.

Between this and The Poet Empress, I’ve definitely got some excellent early frontrunners for the end of the year.

#REVIEW: Trad Wife, by Saratoga Schaefer

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I’ve been suffering through a little bit of a book drought lately— of the seven books I’ve read in March, I’ve only ranked two of them above three stars, and if you’ve paid any attention to my Goodreads or Storygraph accounts (Follow me! I want friends!) you know that I tend to rate generously, as I don’t often buy books I don’t expect to like.

My wife was a little startled to see that I’d picked up Trad Wife, though, which probably doesn’t look like something I’d usually read, especially if you don’t happen to notice that clawed hand on the cover. I own this because of my Aardvark book box subscription; it’s pretty easy to get me to take a risk on a hardcover if it’s only $10, and the club in general has had a pretty good record for horror novels for me.

Because, yeah, this is a horror novel. It’s Rosemary’s Baby crossed with Nightbitch for the TikTok/Instagram generation, which was not a thing I ever expected to type. Main character Camille Deming is an aspiring Instagram influencer and “trad wife” person, meaning she stays at home and cooks and cleans and constantly posts pictures and videos of her perfect house and her perfect lifestyle. The problem is that she doesn’t have a baby, and she feels like her social media is never really going to take off (I feel you, sister) unless she manages to get herself knocked up. The problem is it keeps not happening, and her husband seems to be losing interest in her.

So obviously she’s gonna fuck the first demon who invades her dreams to promise her a child. I mean, really, who wouldn’t? And if the baby doesn’t turn out … quite like she expected, well. Do it for the ‘gram. Or something. I feel like young people at least used to say that.

I actually posted a review of this to GR/SG, and it read, in full, “Absolutely deranged. I loved it.”

A few hours later, this is probably going to be one of those books that declines a bit in my esteem with the passage of time, but its strength is that it’s a fast, propulsive read (only 300 pages) that you will probably finish far too quickly to think about it too much. Once you sit down and think about it— and, to be clear, this is something that I don’t recommend— it’s gonna develop a couple of holes here and there, and a couple of things about the setting are going to feel like they were contrived specifically so that the plot would work. Camille and her husband have just moved to a new home in a new town, for example, away from family and friends. Camille has no one other than her husband and an infuriatingly persistent and nosy neighbor who she’d rather do without, and she kind of has to be isolated for the plot to work— if she even had one good girlfriend the book would not have been able to unfold the way it did.

The book doesn’t actually really address her lack of friends; I assume it’s because she’s decided to dedicate herself solely to her husband; you’re gonna have to roll with it if you want to have a good time. Similarly, if her husband was even vaguely interested in being a good husband or a good father— either! it doesn’t have to be both!— a whole lot would have gone very differently. You will be annoyed by things like this if things like this generally annoy you. Do you want to like your main characters? You may not like Camille very much. I’m not certain you’re supposed to; I’m not sure the author likes her very much. But Trad Wife succeeds at being a creepy page-turner for the few hours you’ll spend with it, and sometimes that’s enough. I needed something I could dive into and enjoy, and it filled that role nicely.

#REVIEW: The Poet Empress, by Shen Tao

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

Bear with me, if you will: before I review this book, I have to review this book. As in, the object made of paper and cardboard that can be held in your hands. I have amassed a lot of special editions and Special Editions over the last couple of years— I have an entire bookshelf where the books are arranged spine-in so that the pretty painted edges are visible, and yes, I can still tell you what damn near all of them are anyway.

I have two copies of Shen Tao’s The Poet Empress. One of them is a book-box special edition from Illumicrate. The other is, supposedly, the regular edition, the one you’ll get from Amazon or if you walk into a brick and mortar bookstore.

The regular edition may very well be the prettiest book I own.

If you love books at all as art objects in and of themselves, go grab this book right now before this printing sells out, because I doubt future editions are going to look like this first one. Don’t read another word; the story doesn’t matter, this book is that pretty and you want to own it so you can look at it. I am going to have to figure out a way to display this one front-facing. The endpapers are gorgeous, the edges are gilded beautifully, and the cover has this lovely sparkly texture on it that I can neither take nor find a decent picture of. It just doesn’t come through properly in photographs. Go buy this book, right now.

Oh, you want to read it? Yeah, you should do that too, because I know it’s only mid-February and things change but right now I feel like this is going to be high in the running for my favorite book of the year. I think the last time I was this impressed by a debut novel was Jade City. Which I think wasn’t actually Fonda Lee’s debut, but it was the first of her books I read. Close enough. It’s matching my enthusiasm for To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, which … I also compared to Jade City. Along with Scarlet Odyssey. And Iron Widow, so maybe I’m overusing this particular comparison, but the point is I really loved all of those books. This is up there with them.

It’s totally prettier than all of them, though.

Anyway, the story: the main character, Wei Yin, is a peasant girl living in the backwoods of a famine-ridden, crumbling empire controlled by the Azalea Dynasty. The empire is, more or less, Not China; roll with it. The emperor is dying, and has chosen his second son, Prince Terren, as his successor, and Prince Terren is seeking a bride. He has sent emissaries all over the country seeking out women who wish to compete for the honor of marrying him. Wei Yin manages to get herself selected, in hope that she will be able to marry the prince and use her influence to save her family and her village from the famine. Prince Terren, unfortunately, quickly turns out to be a horrible bastard.

Now, I’m gonna be honest: at first glance this doesn’t sound great. Does the phrase “enemies-to-lovers romantasy” mean anything to you? Because even the marketing for this book has been leaning into this, and you are just going to have to trust me that this book absolutely is not a romantasy and is far too intricate for such nonsense as “tropes.” Terren and Wei Yin are both impressively complex, layered characters, and … well, I’m not spoiling anything, but this is absolutely not an enemies-to-lovers book. Why is the book called The Poet Empress? Because much of this world’s magic is based on poetry, and when Wei Yin decides that her best bet is to murder Prince Terren, she realizes that the only way she’s going to be able to do it is to write a very particular kind of poem, one that requires her to know and understand the target on an immensely intimate level.

Oh, it’s illegal for women to be able to read, by the way. Which sorta complicates things.

I know, I know, some of you are shaking your heads. Of course she’s going to marry the prince. The damn book is called The Poet Empress, not The Peasant Girl Who Came In Twenty-Third and Got Her Head Chopped Off. I promise you no other aspect of this book is going to be predictable, and the “competition” is dispensed with much more quickly than you think it’s going to. And once that happens the book can get on with its actual goal, which is sinking its claws into you and slowly tearing your heart out. You will be fifteen pages from the end of the book and you will still not know how it’s going to turn out.

It’s also dark as hell, so be prepared for that; Terren is terrible, and Wei Yin is put through some absolutely terrible things as a result of being connected to him, much less actually married to him. On top of that, many of the women who didn’t win the competition are fairly powerful and well-connected in their own rights, and a number of them immediately decide to kill her. And then there’s the dowager empress, who is also unhappy with her son’s choice of bride. And the prince who got passed over in favor of his younger brother. Comparatively, dying of famine in a squalid village almost feels quaint.

This is brilliant fucking work, guys, and I cannot wait for more from Shen Tao. Go get this book right now. Even if you just look at it, it’s worth the money. The fact that there’s an amazing story in there is a bonus.