wordswritinstarlight's reviews
153 reviews

Paladin's Grace by T. Kingfisher

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adventurous emotional funny mysterious reflective fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

T. Kingfisher has my number for horror and apparently also for fantasy romance.  Absolutely fucking adored this.  I’m obsessed with stories about the aftermath of grand fantasy epics, and this DELIVERS THE GOODS.  Killing a god in the first chapter is some incredibly big dick energy and I loved it desperately, and I love every glimpse into what a divine berserker looked like.  The world is beautifully designed, with equal parts Faerun and Discworld energies to create a singularly charming landscape.  Also, the bonds between the surviving paladins of the Saint made me extremely emotional—this book is very much about Relationships, both romantic and platonic, and nailed every single one.

Recommended for fantasy lovers across the board, and especially for people who (like me) want to read a book about what happens when a fantasy hero has to retire.
Phantasma by Kaylie Smith

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adventurous emotional lighthearted mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes

4.5

Pure brain candy, with a fun premise, a cool magic system, and eminently charming main characters.  Loved watching Ophelia learn to embrace violence as a problem-solving option; enjoyed her romance with Blackwell greatly.  The vibe of the mansion was very Crimson Peak, classic cursed manor, which I’m consistently a sucker for.  I wasn’t taken off-guard by a single plot twist in the whole thing, but frankly I don’t put a lot of stock in being Shocked and Astonished by plot twists and that doesn’t bother me or detract from my enjoyment at all.  Also, I’ve been told that I have an unsettling and irritating ability to clock plot twists in books, so that may just be me.

Overall, a great time, easy to read, and actually THE most relatable portrayal of intrusive thoughts I’ve seen in a book.  (I was once told by a psychiatrist that I was definitely obsessive enough for an OCD diagnosis, but not compulsive enough, so I vibed immensely with Ophelia and was NOT surprised to do so.)

Recommended for someone looking for a fast, easy Gothic romance, with the full suite of spooky ghosts, secret doors, and deals with devils.
Ghost Station by S.A. Barnes

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.25

This book is a little like what I think the makers of Alien: Prometheus wanted their movie to be.  I paused that movie to give my husband a forty minute lecture on my vision for a Different Better Movie, so I really enjoyed that vibe.  Barnes’ vision of space travel as basically an array of corporate fiefdoms holding humanity hostage feels extremely fleshed out and plausible, and honestly horrifies me as much as the
murderous alien nanites.
  That being said, I did also immensely enjoy the
murderous alien nanites,
and I think the horror elements of this book will appeal greatly to people who enjoyed the more awful elements of the protomolecule in The Expanse.

My only real critique of this book is that the characters had kind of a spectrum of depth, ranging from “very fleshed out” to “extremely simple,” and I think a little more time could have been spent on them.  The book is pretty quick, in and out in under 300 pages, and it would have been doable to get into the characters a little more without upsetting the pacing.

Recommended to people looking for, essentially, a slasher in space.
Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell

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emotional funny lighthearted relaxing fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

A delightful space opera spin on a classic romance trope.  I love Kiem and Jainan’s dynamic, and getting to see inside both their heads as they bumble their way through their sudden marriage was so charming and endeared me to both of them immediately.  Also, the short story at the end, told entirely through their letters to other people and reports on their movements by the Emperor’s spies, was super fun, 10/10.  The sci-fi elements use a light hand and don’t get bogged down in the technical details, so this is a great read for someone who finds the “harder” end of sci-fi boring or tiring.  The vibe is somewhere between the West Wing and Star Trek, but as a romance.

Recommended to anyone looking for a quick, self-contained romance set on a backdrop of sci-fi political scheming.  
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Captive Prince by C.S. Pacat

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

One of my favorite books of all time.  Recommended to anyone who can be normal about a #Problematic love interest.  I love Laurent very much but he’s a nightmare for about a book and a quarter.
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Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

First of all, the audiobook: I made it through about half of it before I broke and had to read it instead.  I’ve never used the word “overacting” about an audiobook reader before, but this one is uhhhhh a whole lot.  Genuinely she sounds like she’s about to burst into hysterics for more than half of what I read and I might just be an unsympathetic bitch, but it drove me up the wall.

Now, obviously, I DID like the book enough that I went to the trouble of getting it hardcopy to actually read it, rather than just bailing on the audiobook, which I think is a statement in and of itself.  I loved the ongoing mystery of whether Claire is actually seeing ghosts or if she’s just hallucinating
(actually, I’m going to need WAY more books where there are ghosts in space, because I confess that I was not expecting the answer to be “both” and I was delighted)
. I’m also obsessed with any horror story set in the aftermath of a much bigger and more horrible horror story, and the descriptions of the Aurora were genuinely spine-chilling on that front.  I could take or leave the romance plot line, but to be honest I was having such a good time with the rest of it that I’m going to give it a pass.

Recommended for lovers of psychological horror and sci-fi adventures, but also specifically for anyone who watched the show Avenue 5 and went “what if this, but make it fucking terrifying,” which I very much did and this book was exactly what I wanted.  If you have a strong visual imagination, I would maybe recommend not reading this right before bed, but we don’t need to go into why I know that.
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Wolfsong by TJ Klune

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adventurous dark emotional funny hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I cried more reading this book than I probably have in literal years.  I loved Ox as a main character, and watching him grow into himself left me extremely emotionally compromised.  This book has everything you could conceivably want in this sort of magical realism setting, and it’s all set on a backdrop of Found Family Super Deluxe Edition that really did it for me.  I’m haunting my wife daily to take the next one as soon as she’s done with it.

Recommended without reservation, but especially if you watched Teen Wolf and went “what if this was…good, and made sense, and also made me gently weep multiple times.”
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The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown

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dark mysterious sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot

4.0

This novella isn’t reinventing the space horror wheel, but it does a very respectable job at what it’s trying to do and I like that in a book.  Jack is a great protagonist in the vein of Ellen Ripley, and setting the story on a ship trying to go back to Earth from a failed colony was a fun take on the familiar generational ship concept.  This book read like nothing so much as a love story to space operas, horror or otherwise—I clocked at least five different nods to various things, including two separate Star Treks (Stars Trek?  Voyager and The Wrath of Khan).  Good monsters, well-thought-out sci-fi pseudoscience, and multiple explosive decompressions, which is really all I’m looking for in this kind of thing.

Recommended to lovers of Alien, the Year of Hell Star Trek: Voyager episodes, and watching every conceivable problem happen onscreen at the same time.
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Vita Nostra by Sergey Dyachenko, Marina Dyachenko

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 30%.
Look. Okay. This book is beautifully written. I am listening to it on 1.5x speed and I still feel like I 1) have not encountered real plot and 2) keep almost falling asleep. This is a lovely book and I simply cannot hang with it.
Providence Girls by Morgan Dante

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes

4.0

A bittersweet but lovely romance, equal parts sad and beautiful.  Azzie and Vin are wonderful reworkings of Lovecraft’s characters, especially since his female characters are notoriously (in the most generous terms) questionable.  Their stories are fleshed out and given some dimension in Providence Girls, with a kind of even-handed awfulness that vibes well with the usual Lovecraftian nightmare reality—everyone here has experienced something terrible, and it’s equal parts supernatural and aggressively mundane.  I do wish the book had gone a little more into Asenath’s story; I think there’s a lot of potentially interesting material in the issue of the Innsmouth “brides” and Azzie’s father’s rampant sexism, to say nothing of the whole…Asenath situation.  On the other hand, I’m also familiar enough with the source material to know that there’s a lot more concrete material to work with in The Dunwich Horror and Lavinia’s fairly wretched situation, so I don’t hold any grudges.  I would love to read more of this author’s take on the Lovecraft universe, if they ever decided to write more in this setting, though!

Now, I read this book as part of my eternal quest for books about gay people loving monsters, and I would give it a solid B grade on that front.  Azzie’s gradual slide into
losing her humanity and becoming a Deep One
is profoundly tragic, but Vin’s sincere affection and fearlessness throughout is extremely sweet.  I would have liked to see more of their story after
Azzie’s transformation,
rather than the handful of snapshots we get, though.  Honestly I kind of wanted more of the “horror” in the “horror romance” (I would put it at about a 4 out of 10 on horror elements) and some terrifying inhuman deep sea creatures would have done me just right.  Overall, though, a beautifully written romance, and a great example of my personal favorite sub genre of horror, which is “Lovecraftian Horror That Would Have Given Lovecraft A Rage-Induced Stroke”.

As a side note, my only real criticism on a technical level is that this is an epistolary novel and largely in the second person, which is fine and beautifully executed but clearly was not the original draft—there are a handful of places where pronouns slip up and stop being addressed to “you” and return to third-person “she/her/etc.”  As ever, this kind of error is an easy thing to miss and not a dire problem, I’m just literally paid as an editor and I notice this sort of thing whether I’m looking for it or not.

Recommended for other people in the market for anti-Lovecraft Lovecraftian horror or for people who enjoy an introspective modern rewrite of classic stories, like A Dowry of Blood by ST Gibson.
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