One less DNF this month than April! That might be because I’ve been reading less, though. Or maybe just encountering fewer books that disagree with me! Let’s go with the latter, that’s more optimistic.
It ended up being four DNFs, because I tried a new book after this post went live but before the next month started – something I don’t usually do, and will NOT be doing again, because it went so very badly!
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bisexual MCs
PoV: First-person, past-tense; third-person, past tense; multiple PoVs
Published on: 5th September 2024
ISBN: 0356520692
Goodreads
'Stewart's worlds are some of the most exceptionally inventive in modern fantasy. A must read!'
Shannon ChakrabortyAfter a divine war shattered the world, humanity struck a pact with the god in return for regular tribute of magical gems, Kluehnn would restore the world to its former glory. But as each land is transformed, so too are its people changed into strange new forms - if they survive at all.
Hakara is not willing to pay such a price. Desperate to protect herself, and her sister Rasha, she flees her homeland for the safety of a neighbouring kingdom. But tragedy strikes when they're separated, and Hakara is forced to abandon Rasha to an unknown fate.
Yet when Hakara discovers she can channel the power of the magical gems, she's invited to join a clandestine plot to destroy the God Pact. To win Hakara to their cause, the conspirators reveal a startling Rasha is alive - and they can help rescue her.
But only if Hakara goes to war against a god.
The Gods Below begins an epic new fantasy series from Sunday Times bestselling author Andrea Stewart, where two sisters find themselves on opposite sides of a war against gods
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 was supremely bored, reading this. The worldbuilding had potential – there were a couple of details I was intrigued by, especially the underground realm of the gods, which has its own star and also a sea???
But absolutely none of the characters held my interest at all – even as the cast started to get bigger towards and past the 20% mark. It was the very odd sensation of, all their various plotlines/goals should interest me – a woman trying to get back to her younger sister; said younger sister training to become a godkiller; a guy out to find the path to the underground god realm; a woman who wants justice for her executed father and also to save her clan from its decline – there was even an actual god amongst the PoV cast!
But they all bored me. Each one seemed so one-dimensional; none felt like fully developed people. They each had one defining goal/personality trait, and that was it. Any interest I had in the aforementioned goals was drained away by the monotone writing.
The slight interest I had in the underground world of the gods just wasn’t enough to keep me reading. Which reminds me of how I felt when I tried rereading Bone Shard Daughter in order to refresh my memory to read the sequel; I know I loved it the first time around, but I DNFed on the reread. So maybe, probably, I just don’t jive with Stewart’s writing style, unfortunately.
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Representation: Desi-coded cast and setting
PoV: Third-person past-tense
Published on: 25th June 2024
Goodreads
Delve into this debut fantasy and journey through the Spice Gates as Amir, a young man born with the ability to travel between the eight kingdoms, unravels the power that keeps the world in balance.
The weight of spice is more than you know.
Relics of a mysterious god, the Spice Gates connect the eight far-flung kingdoms, each separated by a distinct spice and only accessible by those born with a special mark. This is not a caste of distinction, though, but one of subjugation: Spice Carriers suffer the lashes of their masters, the weight of the spices they bear on their backs, and the jolting pain of the Gates themselves.
Amir is one such Spice Carrier, and he dreams of escaping his fate of being a mule for the rich who gorge themselves on spices like the addicted gluttons they are. More important than relieving his own pain, though, is saving his family, especially his brother, born like him with the unfortunate spice mark that designates him for a life of servitude.
But while Amir makes his plans for freedom, something stirs in the inhospitable spaces between the kingdoms. Fate has designs of its own for Amir, and he soon finds himself drawn into a conspiracy that could disrupt the delicate dynamics of the kingdoms forever.
The more Amir discovers truth and myth blurring, the more he realizes that his own schemes are insignificant compared to the machinations going on around him. Forced to chase after shadows with unlikely companions, searching for answers that he never even thought to question, Amir’s simple dream of slipping away transforms into a grand, Spice Gate–hopping adventure. Gods, assassins, throne-keepers, and slaves all have a vested interest in the spice trade, and Amir will have to decide—for the first time in his life—what kind of world he wants to live in…if the world survives at all.
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.
The premise is great, but the prose is like nails on a chalkboard, arrhythmic and jerky and unable to decide on a vocabulary style. Odd phrasing, odd word choices… It just…grated, constantly. I forced myself to read the first 25%, hoping it would get better, but there was no sign it was going to improve.
his back was on the verge of detaching from the rest of his body, and his throat ached for anything liquid.
Anything liquid? Like gasoline, or urine, or mercury???
The woman’s face emerged from shadow, revealing her in a stark violet gown and a pruned bottom
tf is a pruned bottom?
“They will also see to it that you do not expend our secret
From context it’s clear that this is meant to mean ‘you do not share our secret’ but I don’t know what to do with that phrasing. Who ‘expends’ a secret?
He could smell a heady scent of honeyed sweetness with a floating hint of pungency, as though the breeze were battling an old foe.
This sounds good right up until I actually start thinking about it, and then it sounds really weird.
At first glance, the worldbuilding was very promising – I am loving the slow increase in Desi-inspired settings! – but it started to fall apart for me really quickly. The foundational premise – that the realms are obsessed with spices – was fine, until we started getting contradictory statements that ‘obsession’ actually meant ‘addiction’. It drove me nuts: are spices addictive in this world or not? One second it’s yes, the next it’s no. Which is it? Is describing it as addiction meant to be hyperbole? THIS IS PRETTY IMPORTANT, I NEED YOU TO BE CLEAR ABOUT THIS!
And then right around the 20% mark there was a HUGE REVEAL, at which point we’re hit with the most ridiculously convoluted reasoning trying to justify why a bunch of incredibly important, powerful people would put the responsibility for ALL THE REALMS in the (dramatically unwilling!) hands of a spice carrier – you know, a member of the caste considered the lowest of the low? Who has no resources, no wealth, no access, no freedom of travel, is only one step up from being property? Yes, this is ABSOLUTELY the person you should conscript into doing this top-secret, ultra-important mission for you!
NOT.
Don’t even get me started on how this guy somehow fell in love with a princess, who returns his feelings. HOW??? How did they even MEET, often enough and long enough to develop a relationship??? And why are you just telling telling telling me how he feels about her, instead of showing me???
The infodumping applied to everything, not just the alleged romance. Tell tell tell.
But the biggest problem was the prose. I could probably have put up with the rest of it – unless the plot got even stupider; seriously, you needed an INFINITELY better reason to put this poor man in the position of [total spoiler] – but the writing style was just…I hated it. And from glancing at other reviews, it looks like the worldbuilding goes down the drain, so really, there just wasn’t anything worth sticking around for, unfortunately. Alas!
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Biracial Filipino-coded MC, bisexual MC, trans love interest, M/M/F polyamory, secondary MLM character, trans character, F/M/M polyamory
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; dual PoVs
Published on: 13th August 2024
ISBN: 0316565369
Goodreads
FATE IS A CRUEL MISTRESS
The daughter of a powerful but disgraced Blood Worker, Shan LeClaire has spent her entire life perfecting her blood magic, building her network of spies, and gathering every scrap of power she could. Now, to protect her brother, she assassinates their father and takes her place at the head of the family. And that is only the start of her revenge.
Samuel Hutchinson is a bastard with a terrible gift. When he stumbles upon the first victim of a magical serial killer, he's drawn into the world of magic and intrigue he's worked so hard to avoid - and is pulled deeply into the ravenous and bloodthirsty court of the vampire king.
Tasked by the Eternal King to discover the identity of the killer cutting a bloody swath through the city, Samuel, Shan and mysterious Royal Bloodworker Isaac find themselves growing ever closer to each other. But Shan's plans are treacherous, and as she lures Samuel into her complicated web of desire, treason and vengeance, he must decide if the good of their nation is worth the cost of his soul.
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.
This was one of my most-anticipated reads of the year…but I was just bored.
Mistress of Lies is…fine, I guess? It starts strong, with Shan, our Blood Worker (blood mage) MC murdering her terrible father, but the big bang of the beginning fizzles out immediately.
The prose is mostly lovely, but it was scattered through with oddly-phrased sentences and the occasional jarring word choice that kept knocking me out of my immersion. Like
Unlike Shan, he didn’t have the benefit of a lifetime.
That’s meant to mean, didn’t have a lifetime of experience at Thing, going from context, but that phrasing???
The worldbuilding was so vague as to be nonexistent. What we did get was generic af; vaguely Medieval Western Europe, vaguely Regency. Guys wear cravats, but people say ‘okay’, which made me twitch every time. Society is ruled by Blood Workers (why do so many reviewers keep calling them/comparing them to vampires??? It’s blood magic, not vampirism), which should have opened up so much potential in crafting a very unique society, but if you swapped out the Blood Workers for a non-magical nobility, you’d hardly notice. Those without magic are poor and downtrodden – so, the working and lower classes in a Regency setting, basically. I liked the metal claws the Blood Workers wore, but I need more than some pretty jewellery to keep me interested.
I really wanted to laugh at the idea that Shan is this super spymistress. Um, what? Why not show us that, instead of just telling us over and over? There’s no evidence that she’s as brilliant at intrigue as the book keeps insisting she is; I want EVIDENCE. And why on earth does she call herself the Sparrow, and her second-in-command is the Hawk? You get that hawks EAT sparrows, yes?
Also, love how she ‘tested’ Samuel’s blood to make sure he was the missing heir, but…where did she get the immortal king’s blood to test it against, hm??? ‘Caus I’d bet solid gold that dude does NOT let any of his blood anywhere ANOTHER BLOOD WORKER could potentially get her hands on it.
Sigh. I probably could have stuck this one out – the prose was smooth enough – but I didn’t want to. Shan had potential, but that potential rapidly dissolved into nothing; Samuel I didn’t care about at all. There was nothing interesting about the magic or the setting, and I’m a worldbuilding fanatic, okay, if your worldbuilding is meh I am gone. And the plot? Again, generic, bland, nothing to make it stand out or catch my attention. And I have too many other things to read to waste time on a book I don’t actually care about.
Thus: Sia out, thank you and no thank you.
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Queer MC
PoV: First/Second-person, past-tense
Published on: 15th October 2024
ISBN: 1959411675
Goodreads
A warm and hopeful story of a lonely witch consumed by grief who discovers a whimsical cast of characters in a magical arboretum—and the healing power of found family.
Powerless witch Saika is ready to enact her sister’s final to plant her remains at the famed Ash Gardens. When Saika arrives at the always-stormy sanctuary, she is welcomed by its owner, an enormous, knit-cardiganed mythical beast named Frank, who offers her a role as one of the estate’s caretakers.
Overcome with grief, Saika accepts, desperate to put off her final farewell to her sister. But the work requires a witch with intrinsic power, and Saika’s been disconnected from her magic since her sister’s death two years prior. Saika gets by at the sanctuary using a fragment of a fallen star to cast enchantments—while hiding the embarrassing truth about herself.
As Saika works harder in avoidance of her pain, she learns more about Frank, the decaying house at Ash Gardens, and the lives of the motley staff, including bickering twin cherubs, a mute ghost, a cantankerous elf, and an irritating half witch, among others. Over time, she rediscovers what it means to love and be wholly loved and how to allow her joy and grief to coexist. Warm and inventive, House of Frank is a stirring portrait of the ache of loss and the healing embrace of love.
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.
House of Frank bills itself as a cosy queer fantasy featuring found family, which – yes please! And if you made a list of all this book promises, it sounds like a truly wonderful list: a ‘knit-cardiganed mythical beast named Frank’, a piece of a fallen star, bickering cherubs, a magical arboretum – wonderful! Delightful! Surely this is going to become my new favourite thing!
Reader, it did not become my new favourite thing.
I am always immediately disappointed when I open a book I was anticipating and find that it’s written in first-person. Sometimes first-person is excellent, and the exact right way to tell a particular story, but as a rule of thumb, I don’t love it. So yeah, small disappointed ‘oh’ when I read the opening page. But some of my faves are first-person! First-person can be great! Keep going, Sia.
Except that it very quickly became obvious that this was not one of those times where first-person is Excellent And Also Correct. In fact, maybe it wasn’t first-person at all – maybe it was second-person? Because Saika, our main character and narrator, talks to ‘you’, aka her dead sister Fiona – so is this first- or second-person? It was muddled and unclear and, again, second-person is freaking epic when it works – just look at Harrow the Ninth – but this didn’t work. This couldn’t decide or settle on what it wanted to be, even.
And even if it had been able to pick one and be solidly first- or second-person, the actual writing is horrendous. The prose is awkward, clunky, and Synclaire evidently one of those writers who disdains the word ‘said’, since a garbage can’s worth of eye-rolling dialogue tags are squeezed into the stupidest of places. I couldn’t believe how bad the actual dialogue was – you know when something in you cringes because real people just don’t talk like that? That. All of that. Robotic, unnatural, the speech patterns just perfectly bizarre.
Info-dumps galore, and the various ‘whimsical’ characters who are to make up Saika’s found family are upended over the reader until you’re buried in them; the introductions come too fast, and what’s meant to be cute and/or funny falls flat on its face instead. Whimsy is a hard thing to pull off, and House of Frank doesn’t manage it; superficially, most of the cast seem like they’ve been pulled from a nursery school’s picture books, but there’s nothing appealing or endearing about any of them – not that any of them are granted much in the way of personality. One or two personality traits and a distinctive ‘look’, as if they were designed for a bad cartoon where their being visually distinctive matters much more than them being people. And as other early reviews have noted, the ‘found family’ element is a hard Fail: these characters aren’t loving and supportive of each other, they’re casually toxic and awful. None of them have ever tried to find the ‘mute ghost’ a way to communicate? Not even by giving them a notebook and pencil or something? (Other reviewers have suggested gloves and sign language, which I think would have been excellent – alas that we didn’t get that.) No one notices or cares that Frank’s memory is clearly Not Okay? (That Frank is having memory problems is obvious in the first chapter.) I don’t know what it is, but these characters aren’t even decent friends to each other, never mind found family.
Also, hi, why did you stick cherubs in here? Don’t put angels or demons in your story unless you’re going to tell me if or how their existence implies the existence of the Christian Heaven and god and whatnot. Just randomly sticking them in because you think they’re cute is seriously annoying. If you wanted cute grumpy creatures, fauns are RIGHT THERE.
This is without even BEGINNING to dig into why Saika feels like turning her sister’s ashes into a tree is somehow Wrong, despite it being Fiona’s clear wish and request. That it takes Saika two years to start the process isn’t strange – I’m sure many people take far longer to ‘do something’ with a loved one’s ashes – but how is the arboretum process weird or wrong or whatever? What is it about the tree thing that strikes her as semi-creepy?
Also, Death. Who is most definitely not Terry Pratchett’s Death. Ffs.
(I don’t mean to imply that Pratchett’s Death is the only good example of Death, or the only way to write a personification of death. I mean that Synclaire’s Death is terrible, inexplicably sadistic – in a book that’s supposed to be about healing from grief! – while, much like the cherubs, raising enormous questions simply by EXISTING re the worldbuilding. Questions that inevitably go unanswered.)
But the worst part of this book is the writing. House of Frank is not at all what it claims to be – it’s not cosy, it’s not sweet, it’s just a lot of meh and normalised toxicity – but the actual arranging-words-into-sentences part is objectively the weakest of the book’s many weaknesses. On a technical level, House of Frank reads like a first draft, or maybe a nanonovel (which I guess is functionally the same thing), and I kind of can’t believe it’s being published as-is. It’s just bad.
House of Frank (along with three other books) is meant to be the start of Bindery Books’ catalogue; this is one of the books they’ve decided to burst out of the gate with. If this is how they choose to launch and establish themselves, I don’t hold much confidence that I’m going to like what I see from them in the future.
Did you DNF anything this month?
Thank you for your insight. I have ARCs for all 3 of these books, so I want to know what I’m getting into ahead of time.
I hope you have a better experience with them than I did!