Every so often, you wonder if your favorite writers, drunk off their own powers, toss a coin in the darkness of some much-advanced night and decide to try and write something to see if they can pull it off. Maybe Jacqueline Carey, clutching the laurels rightly heaped upon her after…

In which I get angry at Rae Carson, who tries to fix her errors, maybe too late If you read any of my other reviews, you’ll see that I’m a glutton for punishment. Housebound by the pandemic, yearning to rediscover the escapism and wonder of being a dreamy teenager, I’ve…

Or, why are we still afraid of female anger? What is it, I wonder, that makes some of us — self-identified women — so nervous around the idea of revenge? I recently read Ayesha A Siddiqi’s review of Promising Young Woman. In her review (which pretty much everyone, ever, should…

And also: a not-so-brief tirade about bad sex in romance novels I liked A Bollywood Affair, and I would have liked it even more if it had committed to some of the deep questions its plot prefers to skate past. This novel isn’t the generic dribbly red chicken curry served…

My thoughts on grief and legacy in Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse trilogy **WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE GRISHAVERSE TRILOGY** My feelings about this trilogy are confused by the fact that I spent pretty much all of it waiting for the main character to die. I’d already read Leigh Bardugo’s other Grishaverse…

My reservations and enthusiasm for Helen Hoang’s unique cross-cultural romance The most interesting revelation in “The Bride Test” arrives in the Author’s Note at the end of the novel, when author Helen Hoang explains that she based the main character, Vietnamese immigrant Esme Tran, partly on the character of Hoang’s…

In which I generally like Namina Forna’s YA feminist fantasy I’m not really sure how I first heard about “The Gilded Ones,” and I’m torn about how to review it. First, the good: this book is set in a beautifully built world. Otera is governed by an emperor and his…

I wept and I laughed at Yoon Ha Lee’s visionary space opera trilogy “At some point you had to ask yourself how much legitimacy any government had that feared dissension within more than invasion from without.” It’s not often you read a book where the same character plays both the…

In which I enjoy the heck out of Leigh Bardugo’s criminal caper duology If you’ve heard about Six of Crows and its sequel, Crooked Kingdom, and you’re wondering whether or not to read them, this questionnaire may help: Do you like elaborately plotted novels that DON’T revolve around a war? …