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Daniel Abraham, The Spider’s War: Final volume in The Dagger and the Coin, which has the great feature of starring a banker as the main character and exploring the role of finance in war. But mostly this one is about the final war against the spider priests and the attempt to save humanity both from the spiders and the last dragon, who would prefer that they were all his slaves again. It refuses easy villains or heroes and is otherwise a relatively satisfying conclusion, though there are deliberate loose ends/other things will clearly happen to those of the characters who are still alive.
Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds: The only people who can travel to alternate timelines are people who are dead in those other worlds; the only worlds that can be traveled to are relatively close cousins. This means that worldwalkers are almost always people from precarious circumstances, who survived via luck, who are brought in by the privileged enclave from the environmentally destroyed world around as tolerated servants. This is a great setup and I wish I’d liked anything else about the book. There’s a neat twist about our protagonist’s connections to her family/her past, but while her obsession with an abusive past lover might have been realistic, it really put me off. And I couldn’t stop wondering about the rest of the mechanics: what exactly were the worldwalkers taking from those other worlds, because there was supposedly some vague exploitation/resource extraction going on? Given the setup, the enclave only would have bothered with worldwalkers for material benefit, but what? Why didn’t those other worlds, with roughly similar technology to that in the enclave, notice what was going on and do something about it?
Leigh Bardugo, The Lives of Saints: Very much in traditional fairy tale form: Horrible happenings with often horrible endings, but from Ravka, with some echoes in traditional Western fairy tales.
K. Eason, How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse: Felt like an attempt to capitalize on the success of Gideon the Ninth—knowing/contemporary tone; universe mixing magic and high tech; dynastic struggles of a princess given only partially helpful fairy gifts at her birth celebration. It didn’t do anything for me.
Mercedes Lackey, Exile’s Valor: I needed something comforting, and here was a cozy story about Alberich learning how to thrive as Valdemar’s spymaster, watching as Selenay suffers depression after her father’s death and makes bad romantic choices.
Mercedes Lackey, The Collegium Trilogy: Foundation, Intrigues, Changes: What can I say, feeling nostalgic. This trilogy is set two generations after Vanyel’s life as the Collegium is being built to deal with the influx of new Heralds and the expansion of Valdemar’s size. Mags is a former slave, rescued from a terrible life in jewel mining, and has to learn to navigate his new status. It’s a lot about him getting cuddles and dealing with making friends; did not feel very high stakes.
Mercedes Lackey, Take a Thief: The story of Skif, the thief eventually turned Herald who is mostly a child thief throughout this book. Abuse/neglect, and multiple references to sexual abuse of children though not in detail; Skif becomes a thief to escape his abusive uncle and then when his friends are killed sets himself a mission of revenge. Ends before he meets Talia.
Mercedes Lackey, Brightly Burning: Lan is a merchant’s child savagely abused at the school his unsympathetic parents send him to; then during a bullying incident his Gift explodes with fatal fury. His Companion can control his fire, but there’s not much time for him to master his Gift because Karse is about to invade, and he’s their best hope of fighting them off. This one does have high stakes and a bunch of losses.
Mercedes Lackey, Beyond: Back in time for the founding of Valdemar as an escape from an oppressive empire, before there were Companions. It has the cozy feel of someone building out a familiar world even though the culture is very different (holding constant European-ish fantasy background). Funniest thing: the hero-leader gets super into protecting the sentient “dolls” the Empire uses in place of humans, who are spirits trapped in cloth bodies, and the way he narrates about his favorite is really thirsty, but that never gets any textual acknowledgement despite the fact that he is canonically in a loveless (respectful, not sexless, but arranged) marriage.
Mercedes Lackey, Exile’s Honor: Alberich backstory: How he met his Companion, accepted his exile, and helped win the war against the mercenaries that made Selenay a queen. Despite the fighting, it seems cozy in the way that narrating the backstories of existing characters in a big series often does.
T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead:Retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher with Ruritanian soldiers who have their own gender regardless of how they were assigned at birth and a lot of fungus. Not a big Usher fan but it seemed to do what it set out to.
Classic Monsters Unleashed: New Stories of Famous Creatures, ed. James Aquilone: Not too much surprising here; fewer vampires than would have been present a decade ago, more werewolves and Frankenstein’s monsters. Seanan McGuire contributes a mad scientist rant; also features Joe R. Lansdale, Jonathan Maberry, F. Paul Wilson, Ramsey Campbell, and others.
Robert Jackson Bennett, Locklands: Final volume of his trilogy where magic works like computer programming, with objects and even people “scrived” to do things that should be physically impossible. The book starts with a big timejump: Tevanne, the construct made out of a city and the body of Gregor Dandolo, is conquering the world, and our heroes have become part of a collective of mentally linked people trying to fight back. But Tevanne has captured the only power that seemed able to resist it, and so they launch a desperate plan to break into Tevanne’s prison, kill Crasedes, and maybe block Tevanne from restarting the world (as in, have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?). It’s a good enough conclusion narratively, but I was a bit depressed by the thought that the only way to fix humanity is to make us psychic so we don’t like inflicting harm any more.
Francesca Zappia, Eliza and Her Monsters: Eliza has severe social anxiety (though nobody ever says this outright) and drifts through school; her parents berate her ineffectually and periodically make her abandon the computer/phone/drawing pad she’s buried in. Online, though, Eliza is the creator of a highly popular webcomic, which she’s even monetized for college money, and she has two close friends who help her maintain this as a secret identity. Then a new kid comes to school and it turns out he’s a BNF in her fandom. They grow closer, but Eliza isn’t just the fellow fan he thinks, creating the conflicts you’d expect. Love doesn’t magically heal either Eliza’s anxiety or her love interest’s own problems, which include selective mutism. Teen romance isn’t really my genre, but this did fine despite being really more plausible as a f/f story.
Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds: The only people who can travel to alternate timelines are people who are dead in those other worlds; the only worlds that can be traveled to are relatively close cousins. This means that worldwalkers are almost always people from precarious circumstances, who survived via luck, who are brought in by the privileged enclave from the environmentally destroyed world around as tolerated servants. This is a great setup and I wish I’d liked anything else about the book. There’s a neat twist about our protagonist’s connections to her family/her past, but while her obsession with an abusive past lover might have been realistic, it really put me off. And I couldn’t stop wondering about the rest of the mechanics: what exactly were the worldwalkers taking from those other worlds, because there was supposedly some vague exploitation/resource extraction going on? Given the setup, the enclave only would have bothered with worldwalkers for material benefit, but what? Why didn’t those other worlds, with roughly similar technology to that in the enclave, notice what was going on and do something about it?
Leigh Bardugo, The Lives of Saints: Very much in traditional fairy tale form: Horrible happenings with often horrible endings, but from Ravka, with some echoes in traditional Western fairy tales.
K. Eason, How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse: Felt like an attempt to capitalize on the success of Gideon the Ninth—knowing/contemporary tone; universe mixing magic and high tech; dynastic struggles of a princess given only partially helpful fairy gifts at her birth celebration. It didn’t do anything for me.
Mercedes Lackey, Exile’s Valor: I needed something comforting, and here was a cozy story about Alberich learning how to thrive as Valdemar’s spymaster, watching as Selenay suffers depression after her father’s death and makes bad romantic choices.
Mercedes Lackey, The Collegium Trilogy: Foundation, Intrigues, Changes: What can I say, feeling nostalgic. This trilogy is set two generations after Vanyel’s life as the Collegium is being built to deal with the influx of new Heralds and the expansion of Valdemar’s size. Mags is a former slave, rescued from a terrible life in jewel mining, and has to learn to navigate his new status. It’s a lot about him getting cuddles and dealing with making friends; did not feel very high stakes.
Mercedes Lackey, Take a Thief: The story of Skif, the thief eventually turned Herald who is mostly a child thief throughout this book. Abuse/neglect, and multiple references to sexual abuse of children though not in detail; Skif becomes a thief to escape his abusive uncle and then when his friends are killed sets himself a mission of revenge. Ends before he meets Talia.
Mercedes Lackey, Brightly Burning: Lan is a merchant’s child savagely abused at the school his unsympathetic parents send him to; then during a bullying incident his Gift explodes with fatal fury. His Companion can control his fire, but there’s not much time for him to master his Gift because Karse is about to invade, and he’s their best hope of fighting them off. This one does have high stakes and a bunch of losses.
Mercedes Lackey, Beyond: Back in time for the founding of Valdemar as an escape from an oppressive empire, before there were Companions. It has the cozy feel of someone building out a familiar world even though the culture is very different (holding constant European-ish fantasy background). Funniest thing: the hero-leader gets super into protecting the sentient “dolls” the Empire uses in place of humans, who are spirits trapped in cloth bodies, and the way he narrates about his favorite is really thirsty, but that never gets any textual acknowledgement despite the fact that he is canonically in a loveless (respectful, not sexless, but arranged) marriage.
Mercedes Lackey, Exile’s Honor: Alberich backstory: How he met his Companion, accepted his exile, and helped win the war against the mercenaries that made Selenay a queen. Despite the fighting, it seems cozy in the way that narrating the backstories of existing characters in a big series often does.
T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead:Retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher with Ruritanian soldiers who have their own gender regardless of how they were assigned at birth and a lot of fungus. Not a big Usher fan but it seemed to do what it set out to.
Classic Monsters Unleashed: New Stories of Famous Creatures, ed. James Aquilone: Not too much surprising here; fewer vampires than would have been present a decade ago, more werewolves and Frankenstein’s monsters. Seanan McGuire contributes a mad scientist rant; also features Joe R. Lansdale, Jonathan Maberry, F. Paul Wilson, Ramsey Campbell, and others.
Robert Jackson Bennett, Locklands: Final volume of his trilogy where magic works like computer programming, with objects and even people “scrived” to do things that should be physically impossible. The book starts with a big timejump: Tevanne, the construct made out of a city and the body of Gregor Dandolo, is conquering the world, and our heroes have become part of a collective of mentally linked people trying to fight back. But Tevanne has captured the only power that seemed able to resist it, and so they launch a desperate plan to break into Tevanne’s prison, kill Crasedes, and maybe block Tevanne from restarting the world (as in, have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?). It’s a good enough conclusion narratively, but I was a bit depressed by the thought that the only way to fix humanity is to make us psychic so we don’t like inflicting harm any more.
Francesca Zappia, Eliza and Her Monsters: Eliza has severe social anxiety (though nobody ever says this outright) and drifts through school; her parents berate her ineffectually and periodically make her abandon the computer/phone/drawing pad she’s buried in. Online, though, Eliza is the creator of a highly popular webcomic, which she’s even monetized for college money, and she has two close friends who help her maintain this as a secret identity. Then a new kid comes to school and it turns out he’s a BNF in her fandom. They grow closer, but Eliza isn’t just the fellow fan he thinks, creating the conflicts you’d expect. Love doesn’t magically heal either Eliza’s anxiety or her love interest’s own problems, which include selective mutism. Teen romance isn’t really my genre, but this did fine despite being really more plausible as a f/f story.
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oh interesting, I didn't even remember the romance that was in Eliza and Her Monsters, because to me the book isn't a romance, it's a mental illness book. (And as a book about depression and social anxiety, I thought it was absolutely stellar.)
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So much more plausible as an f/f story that, in my memory of this book, it is an f/f story!