The Blue Fairy's Bookshelf

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...

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 ...

Sisters of the Vast Black Lina Rather, 2019 Premise: A novella about nuns in space. It's really good. I can't remember how this got onto my to-read list, but I'm glad it did. Somewhat in the tradition of many of the early Hugo winners, this novella explores the role of religion in an imagined space-faring future. And, of course, it also mirrors the problems of today. The women who live on the spaceship Our Lady of Impossible Constellations are Roman Catholic nuns, not members of some imaginary future religion. And like nuns throughout history, they don't always agree with the Catholic Church's stance, and don't always obey orders.  Just a few examples with a few minute's Google: The Nuns Who Defied Vatican’s Order to Be Silent: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-aug-05-mn-30832-story.html Vatican crackdown on U.S. nuns a long time brewing: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-vatican-nuns/vatican-crackdown-on-u-s-nuns-a-long-time-brewing-idUSBRE8...

Into the Riverlands (The Singing Hills Cycle #3) Nghi Vo, 2022 Premise: Cleric Chih and Almost Brilliant travel into the riverlands, where the people tell tales while legends walk the roads.  I wasn't sure, at first, whether I liked this third novella as much as the first two in this series. I ended up reading it a second time, and while I still don't love it quite as wholeheartedly, it is a great book. This one is more about how stories are retold and twisted. The other characters Chih travels with either inspired great tales long ago or will inspire them in the future, but the stories that are told are far from reality and overlap in unexpected ways. At the same time, the stories still have value, both in themselves and in what each says about the teller. There's a lot to investigate and unravel here if you have a mind to. There's adventure and horror on the road as well as quiet moments for the characters, each of whom is fascinating.  The world gets more complicate...

The Empress of Salt and Fortune When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain Nghi Vo, 2020 Premise: These lightly linked novellas follow Chih, wandering cleric from the Singing Hills, in their capacity as collector of histories, stories, and the space between the two.  Perfect. Divine. Breathtaking. If you love fantasy, if you love stories, stop what you're doing and read these.  They can be read in either order (and there are more to come in the series), although I think starting with the first ( The Empress of Salt and Fortune ) might give a better introduction to the world.  And what a world! Deeply fantastical and deeply Asian-inspired, it's a marvelous place to visit, if dangerous to live there.  Each novella includes a frame story about Chih and a secondary story being told by one or more characters. In The Empress of Salt and Fortune , an elderly handmaiden cleverly reveals to the cleric the secrets behind recent power struggles in the empire of Anh. In When the Tige...

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo Zen Cho, 2012 Premise: This epistolary novella chronicles a young woman's adventures in the London literary set in the 1920s. This was basically a sampler-size candy box of a piece; full of delightful moments, but it didn't outstay its welcome.  Jade is an aspiring writer who finally achieves notoriety by writing a scathing review of a popular book by a popular author. The novella follows her diary entries for the time that immediately precedes this act and all that follows from it. (Her unexpurgated diary entries, I should say. There's a humorous moment where she reminds herself to delete the explicit descriptions of sex if she decides to publish her diary as an instructive experience for others.)  So she gets tangled up in society (romantically and otherwise), makes some perhaps unwise but completely relatable choices around taking your chances where you can, and has to eventually figure out how to thrive with the hand she's dealt.  For ...

Crossposted from MainliningChristmas.com A Kiss for Midwinter Courtney Milan, 2012 To start, a heads-up: this romance novella contains discussion of statutory rape, miscarriage, senility, compulsive behavior, and historically accurate levels of sexism and bad healthcare. Sound Christmassy yet?  You might not think so, but in fact, the Christmas setting isn't just for contrast with the stress the characters are under. It underlines the Dickensian time and tone of the setting - the poverty and strife the characters witness. Also, there are a few humorous asides where the hero looks askance at the "newfangled" tradition of decorating a tree , of all things.  Jonas is a young doctor fresh from school, full of new ideas but also deeply cynical about the world. He is in love with Lydia. However, Lydia is afraid that Jonas will reveal her dark secret: she was briefly pregnant as a teenager.  I really liked how complex each of their flaws were - nothing obvious or easy to move pa...

The Pursuit Of... Courtney Milan, 2018 Premise: At the Battle of Yorktown, a black American soldier comes upon a British officer who doesn’t seem interested in fighting, or at least in winning. It’s the unlikely beginning of a grand romance.  This... I just... I... How do you type a happy squeeing sound? I absolutely adored this. I loved both characters, how their differences fit together. I sometimes have trouble believing the attraction between romance protagonists, but this is compelling from the first page.  It is also hilarious. Laugh-out-loud funny, tense without being stressful, wonderfully sexy, and beautifully written.  John’s situation as a former slave isn’t softened or glossed over, but neither is it exploited for cheap drama. Henry has his own issues and a very un-British obsession with the Declaration of Independence. This combination means that the book grapples, if gently, with the space between myth and reality when it comes to the founding fathers. This ...

Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, Book 3) Seanan McGuire, 2018 Premise: Cora is a new student at the Home for Wayward Children - the school and refuge for those young souls who traveled to other worlds and came back to Earth despite it no longer being their home. Sequel to Every Heart a Doorway . When is novella three a sequel to novella one? When novella two is a prequel. Beneath the Sugar Sky picks up plot threads from the first novella with mixed results, in my opinion. I still love the characters and the world(s), but I found the pace of this one much less compelling. It meanders, introducing characters and ideas and then moving on, almost a travelogue with a goal more than a quest. Cora is a great character, but she is underserved by the plot hinging so directly on previous events that she wasn't present for. It makes her feel like an extra in a story told largely from her perspective. Again, I still really enjoyed this read, but I wasn't nearly as blown...

Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries, Book 2) Martha Wells, 2018 Premise: The continuing adventures of a security unit with free will. When your actions and your memory can be controlled by outside forces, how do you understand your own past? Sequel to All Systems Red . While not quite as instantly charming as the first novella, this opens up the world and expands the plot. Murderbot is still a delightful narrator, and in this one, it gets to interact with other AIs and other constructs, as well as humans. The two main plots (Murderbot investigating an event from its past and a cover mission pretending to be a human security specialist) trip along briskly, neither dragging nor moving too fast. The novella is just the right length for the plot, although I look forward to reading the four novellas in one go at some point. 4 stars - A Very Good Book

Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children) Seanan McGuire, 2017 Premise: Prequel to Every Heart a Doorway . Jacqueline and Jillian had the kind of parents who shouldn't have children, so when they stumble into a place that offers them mentorship and protection, they take it...for better or worse. It's been just long enough since I read Every Heart a Doorway that I didn't fully remember the roles that Jack and Jill played in that story. I'm not sure whether it's better to read this with the knowledge of their future fates or without it. I actually think the way I accidentally did it might be best, where I slowly remembered the original over the course of reading the prequel. Either way, this is a novella about children whose parents try to force them into roles that don't fit, and how their relationships with themselves and others are screwed up because of it. Sure, their temperaments aren't helped by spending years of their childhoods in...

All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, Book 1) Martha Wells, 2017 Premise: All Murderbot wants is to be left alone to watch tv. Unfortunately, if it doesn't want its free will to be discovered, it still has a job to do, and someone's trying to kill the people it's supposed to protect. This was an absolute delight. Going in, I thought was that this was a novella from the point of view of a killbot. What I found was a snarky sci-fi adventure with a protagonist whose general misanthropy is not entirely genuine, but this never falters into pathos. The humans call it Security Unit, or SecUnit, but a murderbot is what it calls itself. The reason why is a mix of black humor and cynicism. Murderbot is not only hiding its sense of humor but also its free will from both the humans it's assigned to and the shadowy Company that owns it and financed the scientific mission they're on. A SecUnit has consciousness, but it isn't supposed to be able to choose for ...

Final Girls Seanan McGuire, writing as Mira Grant, 2017 Premise: A new technology for completely immersive VR promises extremely effective therapy by causing the patient to feel as though they lived through a specific traumatic experience. A reporter is determined to determine whether it's a hoax. I've liked all of McGuire's novellas so far, and this didn't break the streak. It's interesting that this was released under her horror pen name; it does fit that paradigm. The world created by the VR technology is less intriguing than the magic and ghosts in Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day  and a lot less inventive than the world of Every Heart a Doorway  (which just won a Hugo!), but it's enjoyable nonetheless. This one is a tense, short thriller in which, after everything predictably goes wrong, the main characters are trapped in an unreal dream that is trying to really kill them. It's more compelling than most spins on this premise, partially because it ...

Every Heart a Doorway Seanan McGuire, 2016 Premise: Nancy found the place she belonged. The place she loved more than anything. But she isn’t there anymore, and her parents have sent her to this school, because they don’t believe her when she tells them where she’s been. This fantasy-horror novella is lovely, both heartbreaking and uplifting. The story is about outsiders and belonging, about ideas of good and bad, about compassion and fanaticism. All in under 200 pages. Eleanor West runs a school for children who have returned from journeying in other realms. These latter-day kin to Alice and Dorothy don’t want to adjust to “real” life, they want to go back to the fairylands and underworlds. Each character is intriguing; they each have a reason they went traveling and were changed by their experiences. The ideas and abilities that followed them back to Earth are only part of what makes them different. Nancy can go still as a statue and subsist on little food due to her tra...