I had minor surgery this month; my husband was supposed to, but his heart stopped under the anaesthesia, so his surgery didn’t happen. He’s completely fine, it just seems to have been one of those one-in-a-million-odds things – there’s nothing at all wrong with his heart – but it freaked the fuck out of both of us, as you can imagine. On a lesser note, we’ve been hit with a truly horrific heat wave that’s left me with constant dehydration headaches; not the best conditions for reading!

ARCs Received

CLEARLY EVERYONE HAS DECIDED THAT IT’S A ‘LET’S SPOIL SIA ROTTEN’ MONTH. I regret NOTHING, and am in fact very gleeful and grateful to all the lovely people who approved me (and/or went and found another way to get me a copy, when the ‘official’ arc was a format I couldn’t read!) I have started several of these already and am swooning at how wonderful they are!

Read

12 books read this month – meaning, fewer than April, which was fewer than March. That’s…really not great.

What WAS great were the BOOKS! My gods. Swordcrossed gave me actual goosebumps and made me weepy (in a good way) MULTIPLE TIMES (Freya Marske has levelled UP, folx, you are not ready!!!); The Daughters’ War is extremely grim but also extremely not; and Saints of Storm and Sorrow and Running Close to the Wind are both going straight onto my best-of-the-year list, albeit for wildly different reasons.

I’m also really glad I read Magic, Lies, and Deadly Pies, which was exactly the kind of light read I needed at the time (murder by magic pies!), and that I pushed through and finished The Seep instead of DNFing it. I’m still not sure what I think of it, but it’s beautiful and I’m happy I read it.

To the best of my knowledge, 25% of this month’s books had BIPOC authors. Could be much worse!

Reviewed

Well, I got this month’s arcs reviewed in time. That’s not nothing! But I really do wish I’d been able to write more.

DNF-ed

Four DNFs this month; not unbearable. And The Stars Too Fondly and Cuckoo are both objectively great; I DNFed because they weren’t for me, not because they were bad. The Garden of Delights…I am so conflicted about. I wanted to love it, you know?

ARCs Outstanding

I’ve finished a good chunk of these, so now the job is to write them up! My fingers shall FLY LIKE THE WIND, hopefully!

Unmissable SFF Updates

My Unmissable SFF of 2024 list is a continual work in progress, what with cover reveals, and new books being announced – or discovering books long-since announced, but which I didn’t hear about until just lately! All together, the end of May brings us to a total of 98 Unmissable books!

(The cover reveal for The Scarlet Throne, which was literally today, means that all the books on the list now have their covers! This pleases me.)

How did my predictions/anticipated reads for May go? I declared ten books Unmissable for this month, and–

• there were no five star reads at all (out of the May releases I read)
• one was a four and a half stars read (Evocation)
• one was a four star read (The Brides at High Hill)
• one was a three star read (Road to Ruin)
• two were soft-DNFs, of the I’ll-try-again-later kind (The Z Word and Blood at the Root)
• one was a DNF, but I have such conflicted feelings about it (The Garden of Delights)
• one I have not gotten to yet (Death’s Country)
• three were complete fails (Sins On Their Bones, The Honey Witch, and Keepers of the Stones and Stars)

2/10 – definitely not my best set of predictions! Perhaps June will go better.

Misc

It was Wyrd & Wonder this month, and I got a few decent contributions in! Like Adventures in Discomfort, a rec list of fantasy featuring disabled leads, and my annual lists of magic systems and magical abilities! I did not accomplish everything I wanted to, but one never does, does one?

Looking Forward

June is PACKED full of epic releases, but of the ones I do not have arcs of, I’m looking forward to these two – The Fire Within Them, which is the sequel to The Darkness Before Them, and The Wilderness of Girls, which I really hope is actually fantasy and not just trauma victims being deluded. Fingers crossed!

Now let’s go and have a most excellent Pride Month, people!