Just six DNFs this month! Mostly arcs, several that were great but just not for me, a couple that seemed genuinely Not Great.

A Palace Near the Wind (Natural Engines, #1) by Ai Jiang
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Published on: 8th April 2025
ISBN: 1803369396
Goodreads

From a rising star author, a richly inventive, brutal and beautiful science-fantasy novella. A story of family, loss, oppression and rebellion for readers of Nghi Vo's The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Neon Yang's The Black Tides of Heaven and Kritika H. Rao's The Surviving Sky

Sometimes called Wind Walkers for their ability to command the wind, unlike their human rulers, the Feng people have bark faces, carved limbs, arms of braided branches, and hair of needle threads. 

Bound by duty and tradition, Liu Lufeng, the eldest princess of the Feng royalty, is the next bride to the human king. The negotiation of bridewealth is the only way to stop the expansion of the humans so that the Feng can keep their lands, people, and culture intact. As the eldest, Lufeng should be the next in line to lead the people of Feng, and in the past, that made her sisters disposable. Thankful that her youngest sister, Chuiliu, is too young for a sacrificial marriage, she steps in with plans to kill the king to finally stop the marriages.

But when she starts to uncover the truth about her peoples' origins and realizes Chuiliu will never be safe from the humans, she must learn to let go of duty and tradition, choose her allies carefully, and risk the unknown in order to free her family and shape her own fate.

A powerfully imaginative, compelling story of a young woman seeking to save her family and her home, as well as a devastating meditation on the destruction of the natural world for the sake of an industrial future.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Very confused about who that’s supposed to be on the cover, since our MC is a dryad-type creature, but okay.

I could not deal with the very awkward, overwritten prose, and I have receipts. (Some of these may be typos that get fixed in the published version, but I’m pretty sure most of them are not.)

In a scattered line, the leavers walked towards the Palace.

Got to be honest, I’ve never heard ‘the people who are leaving’ described as ‘leavers’ before and I hate it.

Grandmother raised an arm over my chest, untouching.

Untouching?

Perhaps it was the ominous air he gave about him,

He gave an air? Not emanated/gave off/carried???

crafted items sat within transparent, sharp-edged encasings.

Encasings? And what do these ‘encasings’ look like, pray tell?

To think my sisters had such glorified imaginations of this place and its people.

They have imaginations of these people, not imaginings?

Similar to the guards,

‘Like the guards.’

They were finished for the day, but they knew a member would leave them.

‘Member’ here meaning ‘one of their group’.

I tugged a metal keeper used to store different items over my carvings.

I have no idea what a keeper is or what it looks like. A box? A wardrobe? A chest of drawers?

Suspicion tingled at the bottoms of my feet.

I’m sorry, your suspicion what?

The paintings of Land Wanderers lining the corridor followed my quiet steps with their seemingly moving irises,

Their ‘seemingly moving irises’???

Even if the prose had been better, this book is still swamped in issues. I spent most of my time reading it very confused: are the MC’s people and the palace right next to each other? Is it really a single palace that is swallowing up the would, or is it a city? What do the humans get out of their king marrying a dryad every few years? We’re constantly getting proper nouns that aren’t explained or described, even when characters interact with them (see the quote above about the ‘keeper’). I almost never knew what I was supposed to picture. Or how long was passing – what’s a ‘cycle’? Or a ‘phase’? I thought the former might be a season or even a year, but that didn’t sound right from context, and ‘phase’ doesn’t seem to line up with a lunar month, so???

Bonus: we kept getting statements that were contradicted just a few sentences later, like how the Feng don’t drink tea – except when they do! The moonbugs are the Feng’s companions – except the Feng eat them sometimes!

And I was really hoping for a more nuanced take than ‘progress/industrialisation = evil, nature = good’. What is it with Fantasy idealising nature? Nature isn’t intrinsically good! (It’s not bad either, it just IS.) It certainly isn’t sweet and gentle and serene. Nature is starving to death in winter, or dying of things we can cure or fix; nature is no wheels, no medicine, no plumbing, no heating, no art. Something being ‘natural’ does not at all mean it is better than the alternatives.

That is not me arguing for endless industrialization either. Absolutely not. Destroying the environment is deeply wrong (and deeply stupid). An obsession with ‘progress’ is something I think future generations will dub a mental illness. But the answer is balance, not unmaking (or demonising!) human civilization.

Aside from everything else, Nature vs Industrialisation where the latter is Super Bad is very boring at this point.

The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Horror
Representation: Asian American MC
Published on: 22nd July 2025
ISBN: B0DDJB5V76
Goodreads

A deeply dark academia novel from USA Today bestselling author Cassandra Khaw, perfect for fans of A Deadly Education and The Atlas Six who are hungry for something a little more diabolical.

The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted is the premier academy for the dangerously the Anti-Christs and Ragnaroks, the world-eaters and apocalypse-makers.

Hellebore promises redemption, acceptance, and a normal life after graduation. At least, that’s what Alessa Li is told when she’s kidnapped and forcibly enrolled.
But there’s more to Hellebore than meets the eye. On graduation day, the faculty go on a ravenous rampage, feasting on Alessa’s class. Only Alessa and a group of her classmates escape the carnage. Trapped in the school’s library, they must offer a human sacrifice every night, or else the faculty will break down the door and kill everyone.

Can they band together and survive, or will the faculty eat its fill?

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I have to DNF this, but not because it’s bad! It is, like all of Khaw’s writing, freaking phenomenal – sharp, glittering, brutal.

…it’s just too scary for me! I have been desperately trying to enjoy Khaw’s horror since I fell in love with their sci fi All-Consuming World, but I think it’s time to admit I’m just FAR too much of a wimp! Alas.

The set-up is fantastic, and the characters are all messed-up or unlikeable in interesting and entertaining ways – in just a few chapters, I fell HARD for our main character, who is ruthless and wary and full of sharp edges, and every other character was vivid and – just ALIVE. I was hungry for everyone’s backstories, and fascinated by the huge plethora of magics Khaw has come up with here – we have a literal son of Satan, but also necromancers, family lines dedicated (or maybe owned?) by things calling themselves gods, spider-girls…magnifique!

And the horror is HORRIFYING – I doubt I’m the only one who’s going to be kept awake late at night by the horrors Khaw has pyrographed into my brain. It’s not just the graphic ick, although there’s plenty of that (I specify ick rather than gore, because of course there is gore, but gore is not intrinsically nauseating or even disturbing (in fiction!) unless you’re very sensitive to it. Ick is the stuff that makes you nauseated, that makes your skin crawl, that has you whispering ‘no no no NO’ to yourself as you brace yourself to turn the page. AND THERE IS SO MUCH OF IT HERE.) There’s so much – in the backstories, the emotion, the situation – that claws at your heart. This is the kind of horror that makes you hide under a pillow and yell ‘I REFUSE THE REALITY WHERE THIS EXISTS.’ Because it’s not just terrifying, it hurts. It’s the tragedy and the broken hopefulness, the desperation to be loved, the desperation to LIVE when you’re pretty certain no one is getting out alive.

I would love to know what happens, how this ends. But I think I would need a whole new level of therapy if I continued reading. (This is a compliment.)

KUDOS, KHAW. I wish I was badass enough to read your stuff!

The Secret Market of the Dead by Giovanni De Feo
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy
Published on: 8th July 2025
ISBN: B0DJ72X19Z
Goodreads

An “enthralling” (Genevieve Cogman, author of The Invisible Library and Elusive) Italian-inspired gothic historical fantasy about a young woman who finds her power in the nocturnal realm that lurks beneath her town.

Just beyond the waking edges of Lucerìa, an 18th-century town in the kingdom of Naples, lies the an enigmatic fiefdom governed by seven immortals and fueled by Moira, the power to reshape one’s destiny.

On this porous border separating Day from Night, Oriana spends her time fantasizing about becoming a smith in her father’s forge and eavesdropping on whispered tales of beasts and men who roam the nocturnal realm. But in the Night, these stories come alive, as Oriana saw for herself after she inadvertently trespassed into the Secret Market of the Dead, where vendors hawk Moira to those desperate enough to accept its immeasurably steep price.

Years later, when her father chooses her twin brother to succeed him, Oriana challenges her sibling to a series of trials to determine the forge’s true heir. But as the twins’ fierce competition escalates, with the town and her own family set firmly against her, Oriana realizes that to break free from the stifling confines of Day, she must once again embrace the Night—and, as always, everything comes with a cost.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I think this could have been absolutely amazing had it been written in the style of Tanith Lee’s Night’s Master, a series of interconnected short stories revolving around the Market. Because when Feo gets to write about the strangeness, about all things Night – those were easily the best parts of the book. There’s a folkloric feel to it all, but also a ton of unique creativity that lets loose with the otherworldly imagery, the borderline horror-fantasy elements. Feo is unafraid to be weird – there’s a moment when a cloak of eyes grows countless eyelashes and uses them to fly its wearer, and it was SUPERB! The passages that were about the Market and its denizens, that were describing the bizarre and magical things Oriana saw and experienced – that was all pretty great.

(Pretty great. Bits of it were underwhelming: I was expecting much more pizzazz from the Parliament of Cats, and I didn’t find the allure of Moira convincing for a moment. Since both of those were pretty big deals, that was disappointing.)

The problem for me was twofold: first, I found the writing rhythm just a little off. Years of trying to explain this has convinced me that most readers have no idea what I’m talking about, so this is very unlikely to bother anyone else. For me, it’s as if a piece of music is slightly out of tune – that becomes most of what I can hear, and I can’t appreciate the music itself because some part of my brain can’t let it go. Here and there the phrasing struck me as out of place, or incorrect, or jarring; the dialogue felt flat and false, and whenever we had a stretch of telling-not-showing I wanted to twitch, because the prose just…didn’t flow naturally.

Can’t explain it any better than that, but if you haven’t experienced a similar thing with other books, don’t worry about it, this is an issue most readers clearly don’t have.

The other problem, the one other readers might actually experience too, is that all of the lovely strangeness is bogged down in the very mundane real world. Oriana’s home life made my blood boil – her parents are awful and her twin is a traitor, they can all take a long walk off a short pier – but it was also incredibly boring. That Oriana is so young – eight, maybe, for the first chunk of the book? I assume there’ll be a timeskip at some point where we get to see her older, but – you can have Adult stories that have a young protagonist. It’s difficult (or maybe just rare?) but it can be done. Oriana’s perspective, unfortunately, left this book with a very Young Adult feel that I did not want or sign up for.

I think this would have worked much better as a series of linked short stories than it does as a novel; if the Day parts had been skimmed over rather than given so much pagetime. The Night is where all the appeal of this story is, and it was kind of a waste of time to show us anything else. Especially when it was so clear that Feo, also, was pretty bored with the Day parts and just felt they had to be in there.

And I just don’t feel any urge to continue. Oriana doesn’t wow or interest me as a character, and I never really engaged with her; I don’t care where her story is going. I wouldn’t mind learning more about the Market, about the Night, but with the prose rhythm making me twitch…I’m not willing to keep twitching all the way through.

Great imagination, and prose that won’t bother most other readers. The Secret Market of the Dead is…fine? But I don’t love it, and I don’t have time for books I feel this meh about.

Fatal Shadow (Champions of Fate #1) by Noel Coughlan
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Epic Fantasy
Representation: Black cast
ISBN: 1910206180
Goodreads

Long ago, magic cracked apart the world and suspended great continents between two suns. But the ebb and flow of human history continues. Trade and war cross the void on dragon wings. Great empires rise and topple…

As the rightful heir to one such fallen state, Drinith has known only exile, dashed hope, and constant threat. She has so far eluded the murderous intentions of the tyrant Magian the Infinite thanks to the prophetic visions of the oracle, Quiescat, but his power is failing. All he can glimpse in the future now is his own death.

An assassin’s blade forces her into a desperate gamble. She takes her one final chance to secure the ally she so desperately needs. But at the end of her journey, she’ll find deceit, betrayal, and murder. And she’ll learn Magian isn’t the only threat to her people.

Fatal Shadow is the first of six books in the Champions of Fate series, an epic fantasy packed with fast-paced action, intriguing characters, and imaginative world-building.

A seer has a vision of an assassination, and warns the victim, the queen. For political/cultural reasons, they’re not going to stop the assassin before he attacks, they’re going to have the queen fight him off. That’s eyebrow-raising, but okay, I’ll accept it.

Since they know from the vision how the attack will go, the warmaster person comes up with a sequence of moves to counter that attack and that attack only. Which makes no sense – you presumably know the future can be changed, why on earth would you go ahead as if the assassin won’t alter a single twitch from what was foreseen? – but then, Because Vision, the warmaster decides the queen doesn’t need to wear mail.

Because she’s perfectly safe.

Because of the vision you are making sure does not come true.

No one with any martial experience whatsoever – including childhood pillowfights! – would allow his QUEEN to NOT WEAR ARMOUR for an ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION.

No. Absolutely not. This is on PAGE TWO. If we’re getting this level of Unforgivable Dumb this early I dread to think what nonsense we’ll have later. You don’t need to make your characters dumb as rocks to have big dramatic moments! An assassination is already set up to be dramatic! What the hell!

Gods damn it, I was really hoping this would be epic.

Aurethia Rising by atlas laika
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Representation: M/M, (trans MC?), queernorm setting
Published on: 6th May 2025
ISBN: B0DGRGYFN9
Goodreads

Two centuries ago, House Henly of Aurethia and House Volkov of Griea penned an engagement, promising a union between rival houses and their respective homeworlds.

Elio Henly has been preparing for marriage his entire life. As the Henly heir and future steward of Aurethia, he will inherit great power, including control of a lucrative trade route, and ownership of the most precious substance in the Greater Universe — Avara. The mysterious blue crystal native to Aurethia is the sole treatment for parsec sickness, an epidemic ravaging space travelers within the Greater Universe. But when he meets Cael Volkov, the charming heir of the outfitted military planet, Griea, everything he thought he knew about his homeworld, his family, and his heart is turned upside down.

Cael Volkov has been raised to conquer. Champion in the Tupinaire, commander of the Royal Reserve, and son to the mighty Legatus, Cael knows his mission is gain the Aurethian heir’s trust, learn everything he can about the forest moon, and prepare to take it by force. But the longer he spends with Elio Henly, the quiet, brilliant Aurethian prince, the more he questions everything he was taught, and begins to push back against the rhetoric seeded in him by a lust for vengeance.

Aurethia Rising is an Achillean Space Opera with a happily ever after promise. Content warnings are available inside the novel.

Massively overwritten, to a cringe-inducing level. Occasionally the actual meaning of the sentence isn’t the one the author clearly intends (from context). I have no patience for this sort of thing, so nope, hard DNF. (I didn’t even make it to the second chapter, ffs.)

the extravagant manor punched a partial hole in the horizon

‘a partial hole’?

Today was his eighteenth birthday. He pushed the pungent taste of destiny down his throat.

…he what.

realizing his life would radically change the very moment he crossed the threshold between classified child and perceived adult.

I get what you’re trying to say, but no.

the inevitable snapped like a twig.

…I’ve spun this about in my head every which-way, but it still doesn’t make sense as a sentence. If the inevitable snaps, doesn’t that mean it breaks? As in, doesn’t happen? (In context, the author is saying ‘the inevitable happened/arrived’.)

the impossible undercurrent of what the next day might bring

What is an impossible undercurrent?

Nooooooooo thank you!

Disco Witches of Fire Island: A Novel by Blair Fell
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists, Historical Fantasy
Representation: Gay MCs, secondary Black characters
Published on: 6th May 2025
ISBN: 9798892420358
Goodreads

In the late 1980s, a coven of queer witches on New York's Fire Island strives to protect a young man facing a devastating tragedy.

A gripping novel of magic, romance, and hope—perfect for fans of The House in the Cerulean Sea, the Tales of the City series, and Red, White, and Royal Blue.

It’s 1989, and Joe Agabian and his best friend Ronnie set out to spend their first summer working in the hedonistic gay paradise of Fire Island Pines. Joe is desperate to let loose and finally move beyond the heartbreak of having lost his boyfriend to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The two friends are quickly taken in by a pair of quirky, older house cleaners. But something seems off, and Joe starts to suspect the two older men of being up to something otherworldly. In truth, Howie and Lenny are members of a secret disco witch coven tasked with protecting the island—and young men like Joe—from the relentless tragedies ravaging their community. The only problem is, having lost too many of their fellow witches to the epidemic, the coven’s protective powers have been seriously damaged.

Unaware of all the mystical shenanigans going on, Joe starts to fall for the super-cute bisexual ferryman who just happens to have webbed feet and an unusual ability to hold his breath underwater. But Joe’s longing to find love is tripped up by his own troublesome past as well as the lure of a mysterious hunk he keeps seeing around the island—a man Howie and Lenny warn may be a harbinger of impending doom.

The Disco Witches need to find help—fast—if they’re to save Joe and the island from the Great Darkness. But how? Fans of queer romances with a dash of fantasy will fall in love with this stunning novel of community, love, sex, magic, and hope in desperate times.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Nothing wrong with this one whatsoever, I’m just not the intended audience. I think the right reader will find this hysterical and poignant; for me it was the wrong flavour of silly, the prose is too simple, and I found the characters pretty one-note and uninteresting. And while it’s possible it becomes more Urban Fantasy later, what I read (the first 20%) was closer to magical realism, which doesn’t interest me at all.

Readers who already have an interest in the queer culture of the time period – and especially in Fire Island – should have much more fun than I did, especially if you appreciate the sort of tongue-in-cheek humour Fell’s going for here. (I have a vague suspicion that there’s something like satire going on – not satire, but like satire, playing around with stereotypes and such very deliberately – that I’m not smart enough to understand or appreciate.)

Did you have any DNFs this month?

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