Yes, that’s right, three book reviews in three days, although this one is going to be shorter. Rin Chupeco is kind of a known quantity around here; this is the … sixth? of their books that I’ve read, and I’ve enjoyed all of them and at least one or two have made my end-of-year list. And, honestly, Silver Under Nightfall sat on my unread shelf for long enough that by the time I picked it up to read it I’d forgotten what the hell it was about.
And, honestly, I may never have known what it was about– it’s possible that I just ordered the damn thing on reflex because of 1) that cover (my god, that cover) and 2) Rin Chupeco. Again, known quantity. I buy Rin Chupeco books. It’s a thing I do.
It’s, uh, about vampires? And a bisexual vampire hunter who falls in love with both members of an engaged outwardly-cishet vampire couple? And there is so, so much sex that I promise you is nowhere to be found in the Bible, and that’s three super queer books in a row now. And I’m sorry, but “vampire hunter who falls in love with some vampires” should absolutely have led to me putting this book down, never looking at it again, and quietly looking down on anyone who said good things about it. I’m tired of vampires. I’m tired of vampire books. I’m definitely tired of vampire books where the vampires are irresistible and fuck everything. At least there are no werewolves, I suppose? Yet?
Finished the fucker in a day. Reflected on just how different Chupeco’s writing style is in this book compared to everything else they’ve written. Looked up the sequel. Got mad that the sequel wasn’t available in paperback yet, since my copy of Silver is in paperback. Spent ninety fucking dollars on the absolutely fucking breathtaking Illumicrate editions, which will probably take so long to get here that the paperback will be out by then anyway.
This is going to be One of Those Reviews, I think. I am beginning this review at 7:30 PM on Saturday, which, you will notice, was yesterday. You may have noticed that yesterday-which-for-me-is-still-today’s post is also a book review.
I am writing the second book review of the day because I woke up this morning, read the last two hundred pages of To Cage a God, wrote a review, ate lunch, took a shower, and then read The Sins on Their Bones fucking cover-to-cover in what wasn’t quite a literal single sitting but may as well have been. The eArc I read was four hundred and eighteen pages. I read the entire book in roughly six hours, less if you deduct a couple of pee breaks, some light web surfing and doom scrolling, and a few pieces of frozen pizza for dinner.
The real miracle? I don’t have a physical copy of this book. I’ve read plenty of books in a single sitting before. I don’t think I’ve ever done that with an ebook. Like, literally never. This is the first time.
I also paused to order the book from Amazon, because I got sent this by a publicist in return for a review, and I don’t actually have a physical copy. It comes out May 7th.
You may be wondering what I meant by “one of those reviews” in the first paragraph, there. Here’s the thing: This book started out as an uh-oh, developed into something I was grudgingly respecting, and then moved into fuck it, five stars territory by ending very well. I’ll get into what it’s actually about in a few minutes but it’s very much the type of book that if I talk about too much you’ll think I hated it. I did not! I liked it a lot. But all of the interesting things I have to say about it are gonna feel like gripes. I’m annoying that way sometimes.
But let’s talk about To Cage a God for a second more, because, completely by accident, this book echoes that one quite a lot. Both are set in a proto-Russian setting, with roughly eighteenth- or nineteenth-century technology (guns are mentioned in Bones, but don’t really belong on the cover) and both are mostly about a plot to remove an unjust ruler. Both have substantial gay representation; both have magic, although we’ll get to talking about Sins on their Bones’ magic in a bit. The good guys even get into the bad guys’ palace at the end with more or less the exact same deception, which is one bloody odd coincidence. For a while, I was genuinely concerned that reading both of them in one day was poisoning my opinion of Bones, but as I said: once it heats up it heats up fast.
Let’s go back to the queer representation: I feel bad about complaining about this, but Sins on Their Bones might actually have too much, as I’m pretty sure that literally every character in the book with a speaking role is queer, including two tzars and the entire surviving court of the deposed one. One character gets to give a whole speech about being asexual. I did not notice any trans characters but the rest of the book is so gay that I genuinely think I probably missed an obvious clue somewhere; I refuse to believe everyone in this book is cisgendered. There’s a throwaway line at the end of the book about someone receiving a ton of marriage proposals from across the continent, implying that every other ruling family is super gay too. And there’s a point where someone has to convince a side character who has barely appeared in the book at all that they knew each other as kids, and he tells her that he remembers her first crush, which was on another girl, because of course it was.
And, like, the main character is the deposed tzar, who is married to the guy who deposed him, and he and his court are in hiding for most of the book. He’s very mopey about it. You’ve seen Monty Python’s Holy Grail, right? Remember the bit with the prince in the castle who just wanted to sing? Imagine that guy was the tzar of Russia, only instead of singing, he wanted to have sex with his husband. That’s the vibe for a lot of the book. He snaps out of it eventually, but he’s very sad for basically the whole first half. Also drunk. And the interactions between the main group of characters really don’t feel like an exiled potentate and his court. They’re more like a bunch of grad students in a polycule. At one point they go to a magic library– the magic library is probably my favorite part of the book and I would gleefully read an entire book about Aleksandr, the librarian, and his disembodied head coffee table, and no, I’m not explaining that. But they go to the magic library and they’re sitting in a room listening to the librarian talk and one character sits on another one’s lap. There’s a bit where they’re expositing at each other early in the book and three of them are basically lying in a cuddlelump on the floor.
I don’t know any kings and I definitely don’t know any tzars but I feel like typically the word “cuddlelump” doesn’t get applied to them often. And from now on whenever I think about Cabinet meetings I’m going to imagine Pete Buttigieg walking in and confidently sitting on Merrick Garland’s lap, and none of you can stop me.
Also, everybody’s Jewish, except they aren’t, and I don’t know how I feel about that. Now, Jewish mysticism and Jewish magic are a thing, and they are fascinating, and I have read several really goddamn good books that take inspiration from Kabbalah. The phrase “inspired by Jewish mysticism” was half of what got me to jump at the chance to read this early. But the word “Jewish” doesn’t show up anywhere in this book, and the place names are all clearly drawn from real places in Russia, and it’s not like it’s a pastiche on Judaism, these folks are Ashkenazi Jewish. They’re praying in Hebrew and wearing prayer shawls and the names of God play a big role and churches are called shuls and there are angels whose names are clearly only barely modified from their Biblical equivalents, and it’s so obviously Judaism that it’s really weird to me that the author didn’t just make them Jewish. There are literal Bible quotes scattered around, just without actual chapter and verse references. I mean, there wasn’t ever a Jewish tzar of Russia, but there wasn’t a gay tzar of Russia either, nor did the gay Jewish tzar of Russia have a nonbinary person and an asexual person and a bisexual person and the fourth person was probably the trans person and I didn’t catch it, in their inner court. If we’re gonna go with homonormative 18th century Russia, we can also have homonormative 18th century Russian Jews.
I dunno. The author is Jewish, and I’m not, and I’m not, like, offended by it or anything, but I feel like you can only draw so much “inspiration” from Jewish mysticism before you have to just admit that everybody is an actual Jewish mystic. Like, the big plan to stop the bad guy at the end, and I’m not going to get more specific because spoilers? I know exactly where that came from.
Also, and this is probably just me being petty, but the evil tzar is called “Moy Tzar” nearly every time he’s referred to in the book and there is no other Russian anywhere, and it’s italicized each and every time, and … blech.
So like I said: I have lots of gripes, but … six hours. One sitting. On an ebook. Which I then spent real money to get a physical copy of. I have not quite gone so far as to put this on my end-of-year list, but we’ll see how I feel about it in a week. Go pre-order it, and you can read it on May 7th.
From the “I’d have two nickels, but it’s weird that it happened twice” department: Between Kyne Santos, who wrote this really awesome fucking book, and a simply outstanding TikTok account called Carrie the One, I follow two different math-based drag queen accounts on social media, or at least I did before I killed off my TikTok account. I say an awful lot that you already know from the title and the cover whether you want to read this book or not, but let’s be real here: a book about math written by a drag queen might be the ultimate “you already know if you want to read this” book, and to be honest this is less of a review than a notification that this book exists, and you might have missed it, and if the notion of reading this book rustles your jibblies in literally any way at all you should go spend money right away.
This book is part memoir, part textbook (simultaneously of mathematics, the history of gay culture and the drag movement, and of the history of mathematics) and part adorably unhinged geek-out about how fucking cool math is. You probably need to be at least comfortable with algebra to be able to fully appreciate it, if only because it’s kind of hard to talk a lot about math without getting at least a little bit into the weeds, but Kyne’s going to be explaining what ℵ0 is at some point and if that terrifies you you should at least take a deep breath before jumping in. It’s only 233 pages, though, so even if you have a rough time with it it’s not terribly long.
Each chapter takes on some aspect of mathematics– there’s a chapter on infinity, a chapter on algebra, a chapter on what “proof” means in a mathematical context and what the difference between numbers and numerals are, and so on, and Santos interweaves their own story and the history bits into the more technical (but again, not super technical, so far as it goes) math-focused parts. I picked up a couple of things that I am absolutely going to be bringing up in class, or at least with my Algebra kids– I have my lesson plans for Monday done already, and they’re directly from an anecdote in this book about imaginary square numbers that absolutely set my brain on fire– and Santos is one of those people who can carry a lot of what could be a slog just by sheer enthusiasm for the subject matter. Again, if you’re even the least bit curious, absolutely give this a shot. It’s well worth it.
My biggest problem with Bookshops and Bonedust, Travis Baldree’s follow-up (and prequel to) his most excellent Legends & Lattes, is the title. I cannot, for the life of me, remember the Goddamned name of this book, and I actually had to make sure to upload the cover image first so that I got it right. Bonedust? That word I can remember. But is it Bookstores? Bookshelves? Bookshops? Bookstops? I can’t remember. I’m most likely to go with Bookshelves, but this is turning into trying to remember Bangledoof Clumperplum’s real name at this point; it’s not going to happen and the people I’m talking to will know what I’m referring to anyway.
Legends & Lattes came in second place on my Best Books of 2023 list, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more convinced I’ve become that I should have given two first place awards last year. Because Legends & Lattes *wasn’t* the best book I read last year, but I think with the benefit of a little more hindsight it was my favorite book of last year, and I’m not certain that the list has really had a reason to make that distinction in the past. Despite all that, this sat on the shelf for a little longer than you might expect it to, as I wasn’t terribly happy with the notion that Baldree had decided to write a prequel to L&L and not a proper sequel as the universe clearly demanded.
Well.
Bookstamps & Bonedust might actually be a little better than Legends & Lattes, if only for the presence of Potroast, that adorable little beast in the bottom left corner of the cover. Potroast is a gryphet, a word I’m pretty sure Baldree made up for this book, and one way or another appears to be half pug and half owlbear, and somehow taking what was already the best combination of two animals ever envisioned and combining it with a third animal has resulted in literally the best thing ever. Viv is still wonderful, and the rest of the side characters in this book are at least mostly up to the standards of B&B.
The problem is that Tandri’s not in it, and Viv has another love interest, or maybe what the kids these days would call a situationship(*) and while watching the whatever-it-is blossom between those two characters is great, you know it’s not going anywhere, because Viv and Tandri are perfect, and Viv has to be single to meet Tandri, and so you spend the whole book wondering if something godawful is going to happen to the new love interest, and it doesn’t because this isn’t that kind of book, but it’s still super bittersweet because Baldree makes you want to root for the two of them to be happy forever together even though he’s already established that that can’t and won’t happen. And that’s … kinda bleh. Can we have a throuple in Book Three, maybe? Please?
(We can’t, but I’m not going to tell you why. Let’s just say that there’s an epilogue that sets up Book Three as an actual sequel pretty nicely and you find some stuff out.)
The other problem Bookcases & Bonedust has is that, structurally, it’s very similar to Legends & Lattes, with the main difference being that Viv is stranded in this little town she’s in because of a bad wound she’s taken in battle; she is convalescing for the entire book, and she sort of falls ass-backwards into this local bookstore that serves as the center of all the story’s shenanigans. But the broad strokes of the story are pretty damn repetitive, right down to a ratkin character and pastries forming a more important part of the narrative than you might expect from a typical fantasy book.
The verdict? I loved it and you should read it, but it’s a better book if you haven’t read Legends & Lattes yet, and I think whichever book you read second is going to suffer a little bit regardless of which order you read them in. There are absolutely worse problems for a book to have, and I still maintain that I can read about Viv forever, and if there are a hundred thousand of these books and they’re all the same plot I’m fine with it, but it’s not the breath of fresh air that the first book was, mostly because time rather annoyingly insists in moving in one single direction and it can’t be.
(*) Probably not, because I’m sure I’m using the word wrong, but it’s a fun word nonetheless.
So, if you’re going to make a series switch from hardcover to softcover after the first book comes out, which already guarantees the books on my shelf aren’t going to match, and then you’re going to compound not-matchiness by making sure that the cover design changes radically from the hardcover to the softcover editions, the least you can do is make the softcover editions awesome. And I have to admit it: this has me considering buying the first book again in paperback just so that they match, since the new versions look so Goddamned good.
This is one of the tricky ones. If you look at Goodreads reviews for either this book or the first book in the series, called The Women’s War, you’ll notice that they’re … we’ll say messy. The basic premise of this series, boiled way down, is that a group of women, forced into prostitution when their husbands chose to divorce them or they were deemed unnecessary in other ways, manage to make a fundamental change to the way magic works in their world to give women more agency. To wit: among other things, sexual assault now causes little bursts of magic to be released that can kill the man performing the assault. Magic is explicitly gendered in this series, and without going too deep into the weeds there is women’s magic, men’s magic, and ungendered magic, and while women’s magic has historically been suppressed and devalued, this spell also kicks women’s magic into much higher gear, also creating a wellspring of feminine magic in the middle of what was formerly a wasteland that quickly becomes a feminist kingdom. The main characters are all royalty of some stripe or another, although several of them are former royalty who have been forced to be Abigails (their word for the prostitutes,) one way or another this book is not especially concerned with regular people.
It’s also not especially concerned with gay people, or trans people, or people of color (but more on that bit in a moment,) and two of the three most evil people in the series are the only fat person (we are reminded, Bomber-like, of his fatness every time he is mentioned) and a woman with a facial disfigurement. There is also a blind woman who is One of the Good Guys, but it’s made clear very quickly that she’s not only Not Really Blind, but she’s quickly offered a cure (which, to give some credit, she doesn’t take.)
You can probably imagine that this has caused some controversy, particularly for a book that is pretty explicit about being about high-fantasy feminism. Like, when you tell me that whether you’re male or female can not only affect what kind of magic you can perform but what kind of magic you can see (magic, in this world, is performed by combining “motes” of what are basically magical elements that float around in the world, and so certain kinds of magical motes are easier to find in some places or another, and part of what determines your skill as a mage is how many different kinds of motes you can perceive in the first place,) I’m going to immediately start wondering about how trans people fit into your world, and I’d almost rather you terf it out and go strictly biologically than completely ignore that trans people exist.
And even laying aside the identity and representation concerns, there’s a persistent feeling throughout reading this book that Jenna Glass really didn’t bother thinking super hard about the aspects of her worldbuilding that she wasn’t interested in. For a book that is all about shifting alliances between rival kingdoms, a book where the phrase trade agreements shows up on nearly every page, she doesn’t seem to have much of an idea of how trade works, unless her various principalities and kingdoms are unimaginably small. One of her kingdoms is repeatedly described as the sole source of iron and gems for all the surrounding kingdoms, for example, and you get the feeling that the “trade agreements” between these countries are sometimes over a few pounds of metal. It’s surprisingly low-resolution compared to how well she brings in the political implications of, say, marriages between warring families. But trade? Just say “trade agreements” on every page or two and let the audience fill in the details. At one point after a book and a half you find out that two of the countries speak different languages, and I swear to you that she decided that on the spot so that she could have one character not quite understand what was going on around her. I’m not going to reread the first book to confirm that multiple languages hadn’t ever been mentioned, but they certainly hadn’t come up in the second until it was convenient. Stuff like that.
The thing is, though, IF you can get past all that– and I absolutely would not blame you for a single second if you declined to even try— the book that is here is pretty fucking compelling. What Jenna Glass does really well is write characters, and she’s done a good job over these two books of filling her pages with characters with competing and overlapping sets of interests and national cultures and setting them against each other. It took me forever to get the second book ordered and then to actually pick it up once I had it on the shelf, but now that I have, I feel dumb about taking so long and want to quickly order the final book of the trilogy, which is already out. So it turns out to be one of those books that I can’t really recommend, because of the various bits of sleeve and sloppiness, but I can accurately report my own reaction to the book and let y’all decide, right? So, yeah: I read this, and I enjoyed it, but it’s a mess, and it might be worth it for you to check it out and maybe it might not, so make your own call.
Let’s talk about the race thing for a second. It is interesting to me that the only characters in this book who the book takes care to describe physically are people from Nandel. Nandel is in the north– it’s the iron-and-gems country– and it’s the most openly misogynist of all the various cultures that exist in this book. Nandelites are also repeatedly described as being blonde, blue-eyed, and pale. Over and over again, in fact, and any time anyone else is referred to in terms of their skin color it’s always a shade of brown, although frequently Glass also tosses in a reference to working outside or something, so you never know just what anyone is supposed to look like. I’m going to point out real quick that a world where only whiteness is considered interesting enough to comment on might be a world where brown skin is the default, and then also point out that if everybody is brown except for these handful of characters (none of whom are primary POV characters) then Glass could certainly have been a hell of a lot clearer about it, as this is roughly akin to J.K. Rowling suddenly claiming that Hermione was always meant to be black because her hair is curly.
I will leave it as an exercise to the reader whether that makes any meaningful difference. I suspect not, but YMMV, as always.
I’m kind of entertained that the first book review I wrote in 2020 and the first book review I’m writing in 2021 are both of YA books. And both of them are books that I came to because I’m trying to read widely in terms of the types of characters I read about and the types of authors I’m trying to read books from. To wit, Aiden Thomas is a queer Latinx transgender male, and Cemetery Boys is one of only a handful of books I’ve read with a trans male as the main character. (Also worth checking out: Lila Bowen’s The Shadow series.)
So, what’s it about? Also something I haven’t seen much of: the main character, Yadriel, is a 15-year-old trans boy who is a member of a community of brujx, people who follow traditional practices regarding communicating with and aiding the dead in passing on from this world to the next. The book takes place a couple of days before el Dia de los Muertos, and it begins with Yadriel completing a ritual on his own to confirm himself as a brujo. As it turns out, brujos and brujas have different abilities and focus on different things, and Yadriel’s family has resisted him becoming a brujo since he was assigned female at birth. Prejudice toward Yadriel isn’t a huge part of the book, but his mother was his main protector and she’s been dead for several months as the book starts, and it’s clear that his relationship toward his father is strained at best and moving toward broken at worst. Becoming a brujo requires a sort of confirmation or blessing from Lady Death, you see, and everyone basically thinks that it just won’t work, so they haven’t let him try.
So he does it on his own. And it works. And he summons a ghost, and the ghost is of a boy named Julian who has recently died– so recently, in fact, that no one seems to know he is gone and no one is looking for him. That same night, another member of Yadriel’s community dies (brujx can feel it when other brujx pass away) but despite lots of people looking for him, they can’t find him.
From here, the book moves into what is sort of a murder mystery– Julian remembers very little leading up to his death, and doesn’t want to pass on to the next world until he makes sure his friends are okay– and what is almost a slapsticky sort of thing as Yadriel tries to hide Julian from his family until he can help him pass on. All of whom can see dead people, remember.
I four-starred this; this is one of those books where the good things (the setting, the characters) are very very good and the overall actual plot is not as well executed. I thought the first 100 pages kind of dragged on a bit, and the book really doesn’t feel like a murder mystery until all the sudden at the end the villain is suddenly revealed, in a very Scooby-Doo sort of way. I wasn’t expecting there to even be a villain, to be honest; the search for Miguel, the missing person, is mostly handled off camera and the focus is on finding out how he died and where his body is, not searching for someone who killed him, and Julian’s death felt to me like random gang violence or something similar, and I wasn’t expecting them to pin it to one person and have a big Here Is My Evil Plan moment at the end.
(Like, remember the movie Stand By Me? They know they’re looking for a body the whole time. They know it’s a dead kid. They’re not really worried about how he died, they just want to find him. Imagine if that movie had ended with Ace and Eyeball explaining that they’d murdered Ray Brower in some sort of insurance scam or something. This has much the same feel.)
I can’t quite claim that I loved this book, but it’s still well worth recommending just because of the “I’ve never read anything like this” angle. The representation is great, and I can think of a couple of students I’ve had who I might try to get this book into the hands of. Where it’s strong, it’s very strong, it’s just that the story itself falls down a bit.
Some kind of random thoughts:
Never once is Yadriel’s deadname used in the book. There are two direct references to it; one when someone calls him by it and another when Julian sees it in a yearbook. Both times the name itself is not used in the text.
Thomas’ skill at writing characters who speak a lot of Spanish in a way that’s clear and understandable to non-Spanish readers is frankly phenomenal. My Spanish is good enough that I made it to page 304 before deciding to look something up– and it turned out to be an idiom, so I felt okay about it– but in general whenever someone says something in Spanish, or at least the first time something is said in Spanish, the word or phrase is used in English quickly afterward to make it very easy to infer the meaning of the word from context. Just as an example, Yadriel’s aunt says “Dame un beso” at one point, and the next sentence he kisses her on the cheek. That sort of thing. This could have felt really shoehorned in if Thomas wasn’t careful, but it always felt natural. Nicely done.
The words “Latinx” and “brujx” are used throughout the text, both as character dialogue and as narrative references. This did feel a little intrusive, as I’ve spent a lot of time teaching young people from Latinx backgrounds and have worked at a couple of schools where they were either a solid majority or virtually everyone, and I’ve never heard either of those words out of the mouth of a young person. I mean, okay, I wouldn’t expect “brujx,” but I think if I dropped “Latinx” in conversation with one of my Mexican or Puerto Rican students they wouldn’t know what the hell I was talking about. This isn’t a complaint so much as an observation; it’s entirely possible that the -x suffix is more widely used in other parts of the country and hasn’t made its way to the Midwest yet, but my (possibly erroneous) understanding was that it isn’t widely used yet and, in fact, was kind of controversial. It will be interesting to see if, ten years from now, the term dates the book at all.
Totally had plans to do all sorts of stuff tonight but it all got derailed by having to spend over two hours trying to put together a five minute video for class tomorrow, a project that should have taken no more than fifteen minutes but kept running into truly stupid tech-related delays. And now it’s 9:30 and I haven’t done shit since I got home and all I want to do is go to bed.
One plus side of today, though: got asked, by a pair of the kids, to sponsor a LGBTQ club at school. THAT was unexpected and interesting. I agreed, of course.
