The Neurospicy Bean

  (NetGalley eARC) I really loved the concept of this book – there’s such a long, complicated history of queerness in horror that an anthology like this absolutely makes sense. Unfortunately, the execution of this one just wasn’t what I wanted. The main thing is that every single one of them needed to be longer. They needed more room to establish characters, lore, relationships, and atmosphere – or they needed to try to do fewer of those things. Most of the stories attempted to cover them all, which is just too much for the length of these stories. In some of the stories the ‘horror’ element felt like little more than a set dressing to set up the story the author really wanted to tell. The really frustrating thing is that every single story had so much potential, and some of them had genuinely creepy endings. But because they were so short and tried to accomplish so much, none of them landed the way I wanted them to. Also, I wanted the tone to be overall a little bit more cohesive,...

This book took a while to warm up, but once it got there it was absolutely brilliant. It tells the story of the titular Amina al-Sirafi, once a famed pirate nakhuda (captain), now retired mother living in an isolated hut with her daughter and her own mother. When she’s approached by a wealthy woman asking for help retrieving her kidnapped granddaughter, Amina doesn’t feel like she can refuse one last job. But it turns out to be much more complicated and dangerous than she imagined, and her employer isn’t interested in letting her turn back. Amina partners with a delightful group of friends (and enemies), who honestly made the book for me. One thing I loved about the Daevabad Trilogy was the way Chakraborty incorporated queer characters, and this book took that one step further. It’s the kind of queer representation that makes me feel like, despite the fact that the main character is straight, the book was still written with me and my community in mind. One particular element of the que...

  It sometimes takes me a little while to figure out exactly how I feel about a book. Not so with this one. By halfway in, I knew I absolutely loved it and the second half did not disappoint. The one thing I will say is that calling it horror isn’t quite right; it’s a ghost story but that’s really secondary, and there’s nothing I found more than mildly spooky. But it was still a phenomenal ghost story. I loved the way Taylor’s story tied in and I loved Jaime and Theo’s relationship as well as the friendship between all three characters. Basically the book opens with Theo finding Jaime mysteriously trapped in a house in the woods, and Taylor is off doing her own thing. But soon they get brought together to solve not just Jaime’s imprisonment, but the story behind the house. Like I said, the friendship between the three of them was so fun to read. The book also did a great job of addressing racism and homophobia and how they impact the characters’ lives without feeling heavy-handed o...

Netgalley eARC Review   So for whatever reason, this book just didn’t click with me emotionally. I was engaged with the plot and everything, and I think it’s reasonably well crafted, but something was missing and I’m not entirely sure what. The book focuses on Jay and Leroy and their community as they work to protect their loved ones and fight back against the corporations trying to take over their community. One thing I really loved about this book was its focus on Black community. Everybody didn’t necessarily get along, but each character was connected to all the others. Although this is sort of presented as a romance, to me the romance was actually secondary to all these other relationships. Unfortunately, the downside of this is that the book wasn’t really long enough to do justice to all these complicated relationships, so a lot of them ended up not being as developed as I’d have liked. I wanted more of Jay’s relationship with his dad, of his mom and Rosalind’s relationship, o...

  The main thing this book needed was a big dose of subtlety. There were lots of interesting ideas, relationships, and characters floating around, but they all needed to be treated with a lighter hand in general. For instance, the whole premise of the book is that society has been divided into Alphas and Betas, with Betas being treated as inferior and abused constantly. Although I was definitely weirded out by the concept at first (sorry, it was just giving wayy too many omegaverse vibes), it was alright in practice – especially once I read the author’s note explaining the story’s origins. But it wasn’t hugely effective as a dystopia because it was lacking subtlety. It was just straight-up the Betas are basically slaves and are abused constantly and drugged. But it was really unclear how society had progressed to this point from presumably current times in a single generation because there was no subtlety – how did society come to accept this? Why? What was society like that made p...

  Okay, so first and foremost I would really like to see some reviews by people with bipolar disorder, because I do not feel qualified to dissect that element of the representation. In a few ways the way mental health in general was treated and discussed in the world rubbed me the wrong way – especially the way Adrien talked about Gennady on occasion – but again, I don’t think I have the right perspective to understand or talk about it in a nuanced way. With that out of the way, this book was a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, I found the pacing frustrating – it didn’t really feel like anything happened for the first hundred pages. There was nothing terribly special about the writing either; I didn’t feel overly interested in the characters or the world. And the worldbuilding was a bit off. A lot of terms were thrown around with no real context or explanation, and there didn’t seem to be very consistent rules for where a lot of it was coming from. Similarly, the magic system wa...

  So just to get this out of the way: this book did not quite nail Riordan’s usual snappy dialogue and crying-laughing sense of humor. It definitely tried, but one of the risks of cowriting is always going to be the different voices getting mushed up and lost in one another, and there’s a little bit of that here. But what very much didn’t get lost was the original heart of the Percy Jackson books that we all fell in love with: a general sense of joy, compassion, and hope. Riordan has always made a point of making marginalized identities be an integral part of his world, not an afterthought, and while this hasn’t always been perfect it has always, to me, made his world stand out from series and creators who fling ‘diversity’ at their books without actually considering the way that diversity must impact their world – see my review of “Fairy Tale” for example. And this book isn’t any exception, although it’s maybe more subtle; it does such a good job of blending Nico and Will’s experi...