The Blue Fairy's Bookshelf

Some Desperate Glory Emily Tesh, 2023 Hugo Winner - 2024 Premise: It's not easy being the last outpost of humanity. You have to give up a lot. You have to be committed to the cause. You have to not listen to the propaganda that says that maybe you're actually in a cult... What a book! It might have first gotten on my radar for winning the Hugo, but I had forgotten that by the time I read it, so I was unexpectedly delighted with this.  At least a few SPOILERS must follow here, but before we get there, I'll say that I recommend this for anyone who likes complex/morally messed-up protagonists and some heavy topics in your sci-fi adventure.  I've seen it recommended for fans of the Locked Tomb (not just for the blurb from Tamsyn Muir on the cover), and I agree with that. It starts from a place where you don't know what the protagonist doesn't know about the world they live in, and discovering the truth behind their home is incredibly compelling. (The author's n...

Previous Bookshelf Update post The continued adventures of reading and rereading books I'm not sure I want to keep on my bookshelves. The Robots of Dawn Isaac Asimov, 1983 Whoops. This has sat on my shelf for a very long time, and I think that when I bought it (on a dollar rack, surely), I thought it was one of the collections of Robot stories (I read some of those many years back and remembered enjoying them). Instead, this is an odd novel. This is the third in a series I haven't read any other book in, written decades after the others, and serves as one of a few pieces written around this time that were clearly meant to directly connect the Robot series with the Foundation novels. The characters are fine, if nothing all that special now. The mystery plot is okay, but a bit slow. The book ends with an extremely awkward reveal/twist that's a big part of the aforementioned tie-in with Foundation and I really could have done without it. Overall an ok book, but not one I'm...

Assassin's Apprentice Robin Hobb, 1995 Premise: The life of a royal bastard is always complicated, but it's even more so when certain powers might run in your bloodline.  I tried a different book by this author many, many moons ago and was put off by it enough not to try another. But this one was chosen for a book club, so I decided it was time to give her another try.  Verdict? It's fine.  The characters are fine - nothing too exceptional, nothing badly done about them, except maybe that most are a bit obvious from their first appearances. There's a bit of a Shakespearean feeling to them which is enjoyable, but (again) makes them a bit dramatically predictable.  The plot has moments of real cleverness and tension alongside stretches where I had trouble convincing myself to pick the book back up, which averages out to... fine. I did really like the way the book handled what is effectively a confusion spell being cast on the viewpoint character - that's a fine line ...

Midnight Beverly Jenkins, 2010 Premise: Despite her father supporting the British, Faith Kingston is secretly supporting the rebels in revolutionary-era Boston. Her determination is only increased when the son of her father's long-time rival comes back to town - and he's cute. I have been reading more romance lately (partially for a book club) and when this one turned up on the list of possibilities for last month, I decided to take the opportunity to read one from this prolific author. And it was charming and well-written as expected, but not exceptional. Faith's struggle to work with a father who will never respect or care for her was complex and sympathetic. Her love interest, Nick, is too good to be true, but not more so than is typical for romance.  My biggest criticisms are two-fold. I read this partially for the pitch that she's a secret spy for the Rebel army, but although that is a secret in the beginning, she only does a few things during the action of the bo...

Murder by Memory (Dorothy Gentleman, Book 1) Olivia Waite, 2025 Premise: Investigating a potential murder on a spaceship is tricky enough. Now try doing it in someone else's body. A sci-fi murder mystery by one of my favorite romance authors? Sign me up! I thoroughly enjoyed this story, but I'm hesitant about the idea of it being a series. The sci-fi technology and setting which were integral to this particular puzzle seem unlikely to hold up to scrutiny through more stories.  Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I am. I would love a great series of cozy-ish detective in space stories. But I have so many questions about the setting. Dorothy is a detective on a spaceship that has sidestepped the problem of the generation ship (the idea that if humans were to travel to another livable planet, it would take so long that it would be the great-(some number of great)-grandchildren of the original crew who would actually arrive). On this spaceship, once your body dies, you simply downloa...

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution R. F. Kuang, 2002 Premise: Robin was rescued from death in China as a boy, and he loves so much about his new life in England, especially the chance to study, to perform the translation that underpins the magic that runs the world. But what is the cost of the system? What if Robin isn't willing to pay it anymore? I'll admit that this book first got on my radar as "the book that should have won the Hugo for Best Novel" if not for bad behavior on several fronts. [ https://www.npr.org/2024/02/23/1233355111/the-hugo-awards-scandal-has-shaken-the-sci-fi-community] And it would have been a worthy winner. A tour de force combining fantasy and history to focus an intentionally painful spotlight on the global and personal impacts of colonialism and privilege, it was both compelling and horrifying. In the character of Robin, the tension and inner moral struggle between accepting som...

The Palace of Eros Caro De Robertis, 2024 Premise: A retelling of Psyche and Eros, blending ancient myth with fluid gender and sexuality.  A fascinating book, which I enjoyed a lot, but didn't completely love. The writing is very poetic and languid, which isn't for everyone. It drags in the middle, but the ending is fairly lovely. This mythological romance-adjacent novel mostly follows Psyche, who is at first much like her traditional counterpart - she is impossibly lovely and universally sought after, which eventually raises the ire of Aphrodite. Of course, this book explores how she feels about all of this - the loss of her connection with her sisters as her beauty sets her apart, the feeling of being unpleasantly talked about and watched for nothing that she'd done.  Eros receives less internal examination through much of the book, but is where the story most diverges from the original. Eros is explicitly and supernaturally nonbinary; she/he/they (mostly uses she in the ...

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi Shannon Chakraborty, 2023 Premise: Many have heard of the exploits of the pirate Amina Al-Sirafi. Few know that she retired years ago to raise her daughter, and fewer know that she still misses the sea, as she barely admits it to herself. When a former shipmate's family asks for help (then uses bribes and threats to compel her), she'll have no choice but to regain her ship and her crew, but they've never faced anything like this before.  Middle-aged mom goes on an adventure? Sign me up for this book.  More seriously, I was very quickly drawn into the world and the characters. Medieval-era Muslim seafarers in the Indian Ocean already makes for a colorful and intriguing setting, and as each character was introduced, their backstories added more dimensions and nuances. The blending of different mythologies and religions was especially fun. Amina knows the rules about some kinds of supernatural things, but her Islamic background doesn't hel...

Adrift in Starlight Mindi Briar, 2002 Premise : Tai is a good enough courtesan that they can be somewhat discriminating with their clients. However, a famous actor's money is too much to turn down, even though the request - seduce the man's standoffish fiance - seems shady. For better or worse, professorial Aisha checks boxes Tai didn't know they had. And that's before they end up fleeing the planet together.  Aww, this was adorable. A gender-neutral courtesan flirts with an asexual xeno-archeologist/historian in a universe out of some brightly-colored sci-fi fever dream. Add in a scattering of other fun characters, telepathic alien creatures of a few different types, and multiple unexpected settings, and you've got a super fun romp. Both Tai and Aisha were great to get to know, and I empathized easily with both their problems and hesitations about each other and the solutions. (Because there are solutions. This is a romance, and Aisha is asexual, not aromantic. Als...

I'm paring down my physical bookshelves again (making room for some new stuff). Last year (or the year before?) I read many of the books that I had bought but never read. Now I'm working my way through some that I read many years ago to see if I still like them. I don't have enough to say for full reviews, but I want to record my reactions.  Lythande and The Gratitude of Kings Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1986, 1997 Oof. Talk about problematic authors. I always wanted to like MZB's stuff more than I actually liked her work, even before I found out about her being probably a terrible awful person . (I have a strong memory of throwing Mists of Avalon across the room in fury as a teenager, although I still overall enjoyed it at the time.) Lythande is a book of short stories about the wizard Lythande, whose power depends on keeping the fact that she's a woman a secret. ( The Gratitude of Kings is another story about the character written a decade later.) I liked these storie...

The Stars Too Fondly Emily Hamilton, 2024 Premise: Chloe and her friends meant to break into the old spaceship and try to find out what happened to the crew. They didn't intend to end up on a trip across the galaxy.  This is a light fluffy read if you're in a light fluffy romance mood. I didn't hate it overall, but the sci-fi parts were terrible. I didn't find the characters particularly compelling, but the story was interesting enough, at least at first. The group felt a little checkbox-y, by which I mean that our main protagonist Chloe was "just" a lesbian, but the others "checked off" a bunch of other minority groups, but not in a way that really affected the story, other than the fact that they were a bunch of different flavors of queer and a tight group of friends.  So they are exploring this ship that was supposed to be humanity's great attempt at the stars 20 years earlier, but the crew vanished on the day that was supposed to be the laun...

Tangled Up in You (Meant to Be Series) Christina Lauren, 2024 Premise: Ren had hardly ever been off her parents' remote homestead when she finally convinced them to let her attend college. Once there, she tried to live by her parents' rules, but her curiosity about the world (and about one cute troublemaker) would lead her to an unforgettable road trip that would reveal the truth about her past.  So, I admit that I was very skeptical when I learned that Disney was hiring romance authors to write novels inspired by their animated films. I decided to try this one because I'd been entertained by another romance by Christina Lauren ( https://bluefairysbookshelf.blogspot.com/2021/12/in-holidaze.html ) so I figured this one would hopefully be passable. But I was worried that it would devolve into a game of spot-the-reference and be full of sequences that only made sense in the context of the original movie.  Happily, this was not the case. This wasn't like a fanfiction that ...

The City in Glass Nghi Vo, 2024 Premise: A love story about a city. And a demon. Destruction, history, and rebirth. This novella was fascinating, weird, heartbreaking, and beautiful. I'm not sure what else to say.  Vitrine is a demon and the patron of a thriving port city. She loves the city and the people, but at the beginning of the story, the city is destroyed by angels, all its people murdered. She spends decades recoving from this blow, remembering what was, and slowly seeing what might come next.  That's it. That's the story. During this emotional journey, she is also troubled by one of the angels, who falls in love with her. But love between these beings isn't like mortal love. She has cursed him, and he suffers. They fight and work together and fight again, helping the new city to grow on the ashes of the old in their own ways. And the ending is delightfully weird. They do not "get together" in any human sense, but... how can I say this without complet...