The Blue Fairy's Bookshelf

Crossposted from Mainlining Christmas. Book Review: Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret Benjamin Stevenson, 2024 New Release! I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.  This is a weird one. It's book three in a series, and I haven't read the others. However, I think the bigger factor here is that this book (and its series) is written in a particular style of extremely meta humor which... isn't for everyone. Ernie Cunningham was a mystery buff before his life turned into Murder, She Wrote. With two solved murders under his belt (and written into the previous books, which exist in the world of the story), he's beginning to get a reputation. Enter - the Christmas Special. (The prologue literally has the narrator say that this is a Christmas special.) It's the lead up to Christmas, and he's traveling to see a magician do a holiday benefit show, because the CEO of the nonprofit the benefit is for was murdered, and Ernie's ex-w...

Crossposted from Mainlining Christmas Novella Review: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas Julianna Keyes, 2024 New Release! I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.  I've been reviewing a bunch of retellings this year, and this very nearly qualifies. It starts with a writer on a Christmas Train, after all.  Only in reality, it's more a funny subversion of Hallmark tropes with a happily-ever-after.  Eve and Will are travel writers, and their boss somehow sent them both to cover Christmas in this special holiday resort town. Whoever writes the best article gets a pending promotion. (This is a set-up that makes no sense. Not because of the promotion, but because you wouldn't write about a special (probably prohibitively expensive) Christmas experience in a travel magazine AFTER the holiday.) The problem is that both Eve and Will are Christmas cynics, but their boss isn't at all. They know she's going to want the schmalt...

Crossposted from Mainlining Christmas Book Review: You're a Mean One, Matthew Prince Timothy Janovsky, 2022 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics, although despite the title, it turned out this story is more inspired by/related to Grinchy themes than a retelling of any kind.   Premise: Matthew can't believe he's spending Christmas in the tiny town his mom grew up in, instead of with his friends in NYC, preparing to throw another epic New Year's Bash for the (other) richest kids in town. But apparently he made one mistake too many and has been banished while PR is spun. Making things worse, he's sharing space at his grandparents' home with a local student who is entirely too self-righteous (not to mention gorgeous).  Okay, I might have an addition to my list of favorite romance authors. (I have enough for a list now! Years ago, I never would have thought it.) This was delightful.  First I want to acknowledge the big...

Crossposted from Mainlining Christmas Book Review: Faking Christmas Kerry Winfrey, 2023 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. Whether Christmas in Connecticut is a holiday classic is debatable, but it has inspired several adaptations and remakes, including this one.   Premise: Laurel didn't mean to lie to her boss. She just really needed a job, and one misunderstanding spiraled out of control. Now she has to pretend that her sister's life is hers for one memorable Christmas.  You know what? I liked this one!  Laurel is funny and relatable. She's acknowledges that she's made bad decisions and is trying to do better, gets frustrated, wears her heart on her sleeve, and is fundamentally optimistic, despite also being hugely self-deprecating.  The best parts of Christmas in Connecticut (the banter, the humor and the fun characters) are largely intact, while the occasional sexism of the original is left behind. Laurel got her...

Crossposted from Mainlining Christmas Book Review: It's a Fabulous Life Kelly Farmer, 2023 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. Here's an obvious one.  Premise: It's a Wonderful Life, but cheap-Netflix-remake ready.  I've often been a bit of a cynic when it comes to It's a Wonderful Life, and this book didn't cure me of that.  To me it reads like a romance novel full of very standard modern-romance-movie tropes - Girl lives in small town, but wants to move to the city. Girl's high school crush moves back to town and they reconnect. Both get roped into helping with a town holiday festival. Minor drama as girl can't decide whether to stay in town with first love or strike out for dream life in city. Magic of Christmas makes girl appreciate her life in town and decide to stay with first love. The fact that both girl and first love are female just makes it a modern romance, not an untraditional one.  And act...

Crossposted from Mainlining Christmas. Book Review: Just Like Magic Sarah Hogle, 2022 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics, and I think I read somewhere that this one was loosely inspired by the Grinch, but it's not a super strong connection.   Premise: Bettie had it all. She lost it all. She accidentally summoned a holiday spirit. Now she's got a one-way ticket back to the life she wants, unless she realizes she wants something else instead. I'll be honest, I almost quit reading this book. I hated Bettie. She was awful. She was useless. She was a self-pitying mess of a person who wasn't ever in any real trouble, despite the terrible decisions she'd made and things she'd done.  She was a mess partly because she'd briefly been a child star, but I didn't have any sympathy, because she was also a washed-up wannabe influencer who was trying to scam her way back into relevance rather than admit to her (extremel...

Seasonal crosspost from Mainlining Christmas Book Review: The Kingdom of Sweets Erika Johansen, 2023 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics, starting with this very different take on the Nutcracker.  Premise: A party. A magical toy from a mysterious man. A trip to a wondrous land of sweets. Plus betrayal, torture, and death. Not a story for kids. So I have to admit that I was annoyed fairly early on in this book because it's a dark fantasy based on the Nutcracker, only it's about Clara's goth sister, and yet her name is NOT Marie. I mean, the idea of there being two girls was right there!  But no, the goth bluestocking sister is called Natasha. Natasha and Clara are twins, but Nat was supposedly cursed at their christening by Drosslemeyer, while Clara was blessed. Clara grew up beautiful and sweet, but a bit vapid, while Nat is spiky and awkward and reads books and learns the servants' names.  I was worried early on that ...

The City We Became N. K. Jemisin, 2020 Premise: A city is more than a collection of buildings and streets. It's more than its people and cars. When a city grows large enough, sometimes it... wakes up. Would this book make sense to someone who never lived in NYC?  I'm glad that I'll never know. Reading this book reminded me of everything I loved about my time in the city that never sleeps.  That is, when it wasn't giving me almost-literal nightmares about everything I hate about modern-day America. The City We Became takes place in an explicitly Lovecraft-adjacent world where when a city is large enough it incarnates into a person who is literally the spirit of the city. But this is a process, and there are beings from outside this dimension who want to destroy and consume the cities before they fully wake.  Because New York is New York, it isn't one person, but multiple - one for each borough. They are all fascinating complex characters who exemplify aspects of the...

Nona the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, Book 3) Tamsyn Muir, 2022 Premise: Sequel to Harrow the Ninth. Nona doesn't know who she is, but she lives with people who love her and look after her. There are many things she doesn't know, but she doesn't worry about it too much. However, time is running out for a little makeshift family running from the Nine Houses. I loved this book, once I realized it was book 3 of 4, and not the end of the series. I somehow missed the fact that the planned trilogy turned into a 4-book series while this one was being written, so as I approached the end of the book I was seriously confused for a few minutes.  Independent of that, this is a delight. First, we're switching subgenres yet again. Gideon the Ninth is murder mystery/science fantasy adventure. Harrow the Ninth is more horror/sci-fi with a lot of psychological-thriller twistyness. Nona the Ninth is mostly dystopian slice-of-life, intercut with the backstory/exposition I've been waiting ...

The Angel of the Crows Katherine Addison, 2020 Premise: You've probably heard this story. An injured doctor returns from the war and meets an eccentric detective in need of a roommate. You've never heard it like this.  I honestly forgot this was a Holmes pastiche in the time between putting it on my to read list and starting to read it. So it was rather delightful to realize that I was reading a most unconventional reinterpretation of one of my favorite things, by one of my favorite authors.  Dr. J. H. Doyle (Watson) is our narrator, as usual. The plot is strung together from variations on multiple Holmes tales, adding in a throughline about Jack the Ripper and some other original elements. For me, the repetition of familiar scenarios felt cozy, not like I was cheated at all, plus the old stories are all new again as we hear from characters who had little or no time to tell their stories in the original or find unexpected solutions to the mysteries. Plus, it's set in a del...

A Crime in the Land of 7,000 Islands Zephaniah Sole, 2023 Premise: How do you cope with horror? How do you cope when it's your job? How do you explain the worst things to a child? I read a strong recommendation for this book on a favorite author's best of the year list, and soon took the opportunity to read something a little out of my usual genres. This book is half a crime thriller, and half a completely unique work of mythmaking.  The story follows both FBI agent Ikigai Johnson, in her work on a specific case trying to bring a man who preys on children to justice, and her daughter piecing together the story of the case years later. When Ikigai traveled to the Philippines in search of witnesses to the man's crimes, her then-preteen daughter demanded that her mother explain the case that took her so far away.  And eventually she does so as a beautiful work of myth, in which planes are giant birds and boats are powerful turtle spirits and her mother is a warrior called by t...

He Who Drowned the World Shelley Parker-Chan, 2023 Premise: Sequel to She Who Became the Sun . Zhu continues her fervent quest to become emperor of all China (while hiding her original gender). The Mongol general Ouyang still burns with his desire to take revenge for the murder of his family. Many other characters are waiting in the wings to interfere. This was an incredibly satisfying and fitting sequel. The most interesting thing, I thought, was that the first book was about gender and identity, contrasting Zhu's ambiguity with Ma's femininity and Ouyang's obsession with not being "really" male. This book is about bodies and identity. The relationship between a person and their body. That can include their gender, but there's more to it. Zhu learns to manage a new physical disability and struggles to maintain her troops' confidence in her, as many people see a physical lack as evidence of some deeper problem. She and Ouyang continue their strained, pain...

A Long Time Dead Samara Breger, 2023 Premise: An epic romance. A sumptuous historical love story. A vampire story. So maybe you loved Fingersmith, ( https://bluefairysbookshelf.blogspot.com/2014/03/fingersmith.html ), but thought it would be better with overt supernatural elements.  Or maybe you like the themes of Carmilla and its relations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbian_vampire ), but want a true romance, with hopefully some kind of happiness for the characters.  Well, have I got a book written specifically for you!  A Long Time Dead follows the life and undeath of a Poppy, a cheerful hedonist and (in life) prostitute, who feels drawn to another vampire, the reserved and serious Roisin. They cannot be together for several reasons, most notably because Roisin has sworn to take down her master, the cruel and powerful Cane.  Poppy is a delight. Her adventures through the societies of the undead, her struggles, her general good humor (except for mourning the f...

Fourth Wing Rebecca Yarros, 2023 Premise: Violet's mom is making her go to dragon rider school even though she doesn't want to and it's dangerous. But her sworn enemy is hot. Somehow these characters are not teenagers.  I tried, y'all. I tried to go in with an open mind. The writing isn't terrible, in that the pacing mostly trips along briskly, some of the description is fine, and the exciting bits are sometimes kind of exciting.  But MY GOD. The vapid characters, the complete lack of interesting or believable world-building, and the extremely predictable plot "twists" had me struggling to make it to the end.  You're telling me the hot rebel guy is actually nice, and also on the morally right side? I'm so shocked.  And then the narration awkwardly has to remind us that our heroine is 20, so we can stick in an explicit sex scene.  Y'all. I am not against sex scenes. And these were.... fine? Not terrible. But they didn't progress the plot or ...

Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, Book 2) Tamsyn Muir, 2020 Premise: Sequel to Gideon the Ninth . Harrow has survived the trials of Cannan House. Sort of. Now she must train to fight a monster that can kill the God-Emperor of the Nine Houses... unless nothing is as it seems. Man, this book is awesome, but it asks a lot of you.  The first time I read it, it was like a fantastic psychological horror movie. The book switches back and forth between the present-day Harrow and flashbacks. Only the flashbacks don't match what happened in the previous book. You, the reader, know that something is wrong. Something is askew. Is it in Harrow's mind? What does this mean? What actually happened then? What is happening now? The answers are wilder and weirder than I initially could have imagined. It's fantastic. The third time I read this book, it was as an audiobook, which made me slow down and really appreciate all the details and character beats. The emotional payoffs in this one are...

The Last Graduate and The Golden Enclaves (The Scholomance, Book 2 and 3) Naomi Novik, 2021, 2022 Premise: Sequels to A Deadly Education . El and her friends cook up an audacious scheme to get out of high school alive, only to discover that life outside the Scholomance is stalked by deadlier dangers.  (Thematic spoilers for this series below, but no explicit plot spoilers except for the one implied by the title of book two.) So I liked book one, right? And from the title of the second book, I was pretty sure our heroes were going to find a way around the whole "every group of kids has to run this deadly gauntlet to escape the high school" status quo.  And they did, and it was awesome. However, it was really in the third book where this series shifted gears and revealed its heart. It isn't just about characters growing up. It isn't just about kids with magic in a dangerous world. There's no big bad guy to fight, although there are dangerous power players.  It'...

Mammoths at the Gates (The Singing Hills Cycle, Book 4 Nghi Vo, 2023 Premise: Follows Into the Riverlands, although these books can mostly be read in any order. Cleric Chih is finally headed home after many adventures, only to run into trouble at the abbey's very doors. Like each of the preceding novellas, this is both an entertaining fantasy adventure and a beautiful meditation. In this case, the deeper meaning is focused on memory.  When Chih returns home to the Singing Hills Abbey, they discover that most of the other inhabitants are off on a special investigation and their beloved mentor has passed away. This would be stressful enough without the mentor's granddaughters, their soldiers, and their very large mammoths demanding the elder cleric's body, contrary to Abbey tradition.  That's the surface story. The real story is about remembering someone who is gone, and all the stories, contradictory and complex as they may be, that make up a life. It's also about ...

Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, Book 1) Tamsyn Muir, 2019 Read to the end...  Premise: Gideon has been trying to escape the Ninth House since she was a child. Now her only way out might be to accompany her nemesis Harrowhark in her quest to become one of the Emperor's chosen necromancers. But the trial to become a lyctor is far from safe for necromancers and their bodyguards. I know, I know, I'm late to the party here.  I can nitpick about some intentionally anachronistic word choices that were a smidge too tone-breaking for me. I could point out that at the end of the book I still understand almost nothing about the structure of this Empire, how big it is, what it means that the Emperor "resurrected" the Houses, how the Houses are even supposed to work.  But little of that matters.  Gideon's sarcastic, hilarious voice carries you through the beginning and the light exposition about the bonkers uber-goth-necromancers-somehow-built-a-society setting, and then t...

We Could Be So Good Cat Sebastian, 2023 Premise: Nick has worked hard for his newspaper job and his safe, small life. But when the boss's son Andy blows in, sparks fly, and suddenly new, previously unthinkable things may be possible.  I have in the past been somewhat unsatisfied with Cat Sebastian's romances. They aren't bad, just a little light on tension and stakes for my taste. I heard some strong recommendations for this new one, however, so I decided to check it out. I'm happy to share that I'm glad I did.  The 1950s NYC setting already sets this apart from most of the LGBT historical romances I've read. It feels well researched; I could see and feel Nick's rickety fire escape and his family's Italian neighborhood, Andy's fancy inherited penthouse, the bustle of the newsroom, and the chill of the waterfront.  The book makes the most out of switching protagonists, diving deep into their perspectives and emotions. This both helps them feel like d...

A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, Book 1) Naomi Novik, 2020 Premise : El attends a school for magic-users. Only the school is probably trying to kill them, and it'll take more than dedication to learning to survive. Despite having enjoyed many of Novik's other books, I avoided this one for a few years. Anything where the opening pitch is "school of sorcerers" is getting some serious side-eye from me, and I figured it was YA-ish, and I find YA tedious or disappointing 90% of the time.  In this case, I ran across some more info about the protagonist on Tumblr that piqued my interest. El's name is really Galadriel because her mom is a hippie witch. She has a talent for dark and deadly magic so strong that it basically amounts to a curse. (As in, it's very difficult for her to, say, cast a spell to help a flower grow, but she would find it incredibly easy to poison an entire countryside.) She's trying to keep both these facts (her mom and her power) from be...