soupçon/ˈsuːpsɒn,ˈsuːpsɒ̃/ noun
1. a very small quantity of something; a slight trace, as of a particular taste or flavorSunday Soupçons is where I scribble mini-reviews for books I don’t have the brainspace/eloquence/smarts to write about in depth – or if I just don’t have anything interesting to say beyond I LIKED IT AND YOU SHOULD READ IT TOO!
One sci fi I loved, one horror I didn’t!
Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2) by Yoon Ha Lee
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Representation: Queer MC, trans MC, major nonbinary character
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
ISBN: B06XNX2H6Z
Goodreads
War. Heresy. Madness.
Shuos Jedao is unleashed. The long-dead general, preserved with exotic technologies as a weapon, has possessed the body of gifted young captain Kel Cheris.
Now, General Kel Khiruev’s fleet, racing to the Severed March to stop a fresh enemy incursion, has fallen under Jedao’s sway. Only Khiruev’s aide, Lieutenant Colonel Kel Brezan, is able to shake off the influence of the brilliant but psychotic Jedao.
The rogue general seems intent on defending the hexarchate, but can Khiruev—or Brezan—trust him? For that matter, can they trust Kel Command, or will their own rulers wipe out the whole swarm to destroy one man?
Last year I finally managed to read Ninefox Gambit, and it rocked! But I think Raven Strategem is EVEN BETTER. Without question, I enjoyed it even more than I did Ninefox.
Part of it is the very simple thing of, Raven shows us a lot less combat, which immediately makes it more interesting to me personally – ‘military sci fi’ is not to my taste, and that’s not at all what Ninefox is, but it leans in that direction. A good bit of Raven takes place on the front-lines of repelling an invasion, but all of it is space combat, which for whatever ridiculous reason does not bore me like conventional in-person combat does. More pertinently, Raven is divided between perspectives; where we were almost entirely with Cheris in Ninefox, here we have Khiruev, a Kel general; Hexarch Mikodez, one of the heads of the Hexarchate, specifically the leader of the Shuos faction, who are the assassins and spies; and Brezan, a ‘crashhawk’, meaning a Kel (soldier) who doesn’t have formation instinct – the thing that compels Kel to obey their superior officers.
Khiruev and Brezan show us a lot of the ‘normal’ Hexarchate via their memories of childhood and Kel training, and Mikodez gives us a direct line to the ruling of the Hexarchate. I loved all three of them – yes, even Mikodez, despite what a terrible person he is! I cannot put my finger on how exactly Lee made him into my favourite, but somehow, that happened. Maybe it’s the contrast of all the small, ‘normal’ details – like his sense of humour and his love of candy – with all the scheming and assassinating? (Totally a word.) He is distressingly personable, honestly, and only becomes more so as we get more and more of his relationships with his brother, who is also his body-double, and his terrifyingly brilliant secretary. The emotion! The genuine friendship and love! Meep!
Brezan and Mikodez both serve to give us more insight into the Hexarchate’s views on queerness/sexuality/gender in general. Mikodez’s brother, Istradez, was born his sister – which wouldn’t be noteworthy to me, except that the sex change wasn’t because Istradez is trans. In fact, the implication I got was that the sex change wasn’t even consensual. It was to turn Istradez into Mikodez’s body-double, since that’s something Mikodez, in his political position, needs very badly. UM?! More confusingly, Istradez is very much a man now; sees himself as one, is seen as others by one. It’s as if the sex change also altered his gender.
(I guess I should also mention that Istradez is Mikodez’s occasional (enthusiastically consensual) lover? Which doesn’t make anyone in this setting bat an eye? Okay then.)
Whereas Brezan is trans, as we modern readers understand the term. But he has not undergone any kind of sex change, and the term ‘womanform’ that’s used to refer to him seems to be derogatory. (Though no one ever actually calls him a woman or uses female pronouns for him.) This is puzzling because the Hexarchate is in no way a patriarchy; the derogatory feelings are not because people think he’s a woman; no one here thinks women are less than men. Are people looking down on him for not having a sex change? It’s not clear. Nor do we know why Brezan hasn’t gone through the same kind of physical sex change as Istradez; does he simply not wish to, or can he not afford the process…? I never picked up on any hints about why.
This is a tiny part of the book, to be clear; the whole Thing is just something that caught my attention because gender and queerness in SFF settings is a huge interest of mine.
If I have any critique, it’s that the True Plan kind of comes out of nowhere – the reveal isn’t one we can retroactively see coming, so it’s pretty abrupt, and because it depends on the math-magic of this setting we have absolutely no clue how it works. But this is a very mild critique: showing us the True Plan earlier would have necessitated giving us a POV that is very deliberately absent. The book revolves around this absence; every other POV orbits it like a black hole. (Can astral bodies orbit a black hole in a stable fashion? Probably not, but I think that actually works for this metaphor.) The absence is incredibly powerful, and I think it would have massively weakened the book if we’d had that POV. Without it, the reveal was always going to be abrupt. I think you could even argue that the abruptness is also deliberate, that it’s meant to feel like a magic trick. In the comments on my review of Ninefox, I guessed that the reader’s inability to comprehend or follow the math-magic was deliberate on Lee’s part, to make the reader feel the same kind of incomprehension that Cheris feels (albeit she’s feeling it about other things, not the math); it’s very possible that the abruptness is filling a similar role here, that we’re supposed to feel that sudden shock because that’s what the characters feel. It’s a method of immersion. The reveal is meant to feel like there was no way to see it coming, because it’s a plan put together by a genius that no one in-book could predict.
…Yeah I was originally going to give this a 4.5, but after that I think we have to call it a 5!
Cabaret in Flames by Hache Pueyo
Genres: Adult, Horror
Representation: Brazilian amputee MC
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
Published on: 10th March 2026
ISBN: B0F5PDN3B6
Goodreads
Hache Pueyo returns after But Not Too Bold with her new novella Cabaret in Flames, where Interview with the Vampire meets Certain Dark Things in an alternate-Brazil where brutal flesh-hungering Guls stalk the night streets and manipulate the government from their glittering cabaret
Guls can be brutal. Few know this better than Ariadne, who lost half her body to their appetites, but their brutality is a predictable constant amid Brazil’s political chaos. Now, she treats them in the specialized clinic she inherited from Erik Yurkov—the mentor who rescued her as a child, trained her in medicine, built her prostheses, and disappeared without a trace.
Ariadne’s routine is disturbed when Quaint knocks on her a charming, tattooed gul claiming to be Erik’s oldest friend. Quaint suspects foul play in Erik’s disappearance, and they soon discover Erik sought asylum at Cabaré, an infamous club in Rio de Janeiro frequented by the gul elite.
Together, Ariadne and Quaint will unravel the conspiracy behind their friend’s disappearance, navigate the labyrinthine world of Ariadne’s memories, and discover what Erik means to them—and what they are starting to mean to each other.
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.
So it turns out that being a fan of But Not Too Bold doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to enjoy Cabaret in Flames.
Um.
This is much, much darker than But Not Too Bold: you have guls, who are not technically cannibals because they’re not human, eating humans. There are death squads of fascists on the streets (who are fans of guls??? For some reason???) And our protagonist’s backstory (which we do get flashbacks to, albeit not super explicit ones, and which is very plot-relevant) involves long-term CSA, being eaten long-term (bit by bit), and having her limbs removed so she couldn’t run away from it. All by the same person, to be clear.
I wasn’t ready for that at all. (Where the fuck were the content warnings, Tor??? I seriously hope the final copy has some, because my advanced reader copy didn’t.) So do know that, going in: this is much darker and grimmer than But Not Too Bold, without the whimsy and playfulness of BNTB. I loved BNTB: I did not enjoy Cabaret in Flames at all.
Only some of that was due to the darker themes – which are obviously not objectively bad, just not to my taste. What was objectively bad was quite a bit of the prose. I believe Pueyo originally wrote this book in Portuguese, and the English edition is expanded from that. From the author note and lack of credit to a translator, I’m under the impression Pueyo translated this herself. I think that’s also how things went with BNTB. But whereas BNTB only had an occasional slight stiltedness to its prose, Cabaret is often really clunky, sounding like a bad Google Translate translation. I think many individual words and sentences have been translated directly, in the ‘one word equates to one other word’ way that Google Translate does, rather than…smoothed out so that they still sound good in the new language. Examples below, all taken from my advanced reader copy.
That’s how they call the politically unwanted. Food.
A good translation would be ‘that’s what they call’, not ‘that’s how they call’.
“We envisioned this plan where we would go to Minotauro’s house when he least expected it.
‘We envisioned this plan’ is extremely clunky phrasing in English.
Rafaela was out of their range
In context, this is saying that Rafaela is out of their reach, as in has escaped or disappeared, not that she’s out of range of their radio or whatever. When you mean ‘out of their reach’, then ‘out of their range’ is very wonky.
Ariadne reciprocated the revulsion
Reminds me of ‘her breath elongated’. This is just really bad phrasing in English.
The worldbuilding was really confusing to me; guls exist, and have always existed, but not in secret? Humans know all about them? I think? In which case it makes no sense that there are no laws governing guls, no police for them, no system set up so that they can eat without murdering people. Alternatively, why aren’t the guls in hiding – you would think that humans would be very invested in wiping them out. There’s no sense of gul culture, which might be explained by their low numbers, but did mean I never really understood them as a community – there’s no consensus on who or how you should eat, for example; some guls eat their friends, some guls hunt nazis, some guls buy children and keep them in the attic to snack on. Quaint, the main gul character, has strong opinions about the latter, but most guls don’t seem to. Why not? Quaint uses funerary jewellery and tattoos to memorialise humans he’s known and cared about, but we don’t see or hear of any other guls doing anything similar. Who are they as a people? I have no clue.
The horror leans heavily on the reader’s discomfort with the themes rather than the writing itself making you feel it. The scene where Ariadne conceives of the building as a throat stands out because it’s the only time anything like it happens in the book; Cabaret doesn’t use creepy imagery or anything else to underscore the horror. It made the whole book feel like a blunt object. Quaint’s moralising, both about fascists and other guls, was very heavy-handed and lecture-y: yep, we get it, you’re a good gul! The romance seemed very abrupt to me, and I really didn’t understand what the relationship was built on.
Insofar as I can judge it, Ariadne’s trauma seemed believable to me, but I can’t decide if her abuse feels shock-value-y or not. I’m leaning towards not, because we see so little of it, it’s never gratuitous. On the other hand, flitting and dancing around it feels coy in a way I really dislike. But I’m not sure that’s a flaw in the writing; it could just be that I was never going to enjoy reading about this kind of thing, however well it was written.
Story wasn’t for me, prose was objectively quite weak. Neither will prevent me picking up anything else Pueyo writes in English, purely on the strength of BNTB.
Trigger warnings: View Spoiler »
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