Dragon Champion (E. E. Knight)

Dragon Champion
The Age of Fire series, Book 1
E. E. Knight
Tantor Audio
Fiction, Fantasy
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Deep under the mountain, under the loving and watchful eye of a green dragonelle, five eggs hatched - but, within minutes, driven by instinctive male rivalry, one would be dead, another crippled and pushed from the egg shelf. The Gray male emerged victorious, against all odds. Grays are usually not expected to survive in mixed clutches; they are unusual dragons, lacking the heavy protective scales of the other dragon colors, but making up for the deficiency with greater speed and stealth, all of which young Auron will need.
The world is no longer a good place for dragons. The humanoid species who once looked to them for protection from dark, marauding blighters now take up arms against them, and every year fewer wings can be seen in the skies above the world. When dwarven raiders at last find the hatchlings' sanctuary, only Auron and one of his sisters escape the slaughter, both too young to have their flames, let alone their wings - and before long he and Wistala are forced to separate. Thus begins the journey of the Gray drake, a journey that will take him to the far corners of the land, often in strange company and confronting stranger enemies, searching for a way to save his kind from extinction.

REVIEW: Told from the perspective of dragons in a fantasy world that has long regarded them as monsters, Dragon Champion draws clear influence from old-school yarns like The Hobbit and Watership Down... not always in good ways. Like those stories, it creates a sprawling world of various races and species who mingle and clash, wading into legends and lore and poetry (and occasional attempts at archaic language) and conflicting accounts of history - and, like those stories, it seems more than happy to relegate all females of all cultures and species to subordinate roles barely a step above inanimate objects (with so few exceptions that one can count them on the fingers of one hand with multiple leftovers, and even those characters are often undermined by ultimately desiring nothing but to be wives and mothers), to the point where I sometimes wondered if the original target audience was young boys still at the "girls have icky girl germs" stage.
The tale starts with some promise (if with the "no girls allowed" club sign already prominent), with the eventful hatching and struggle among the three males, introducing the dragon world as one red in tooth and claw from the first breaths outside their shells - at least for the males, who are the only ones with remotely interesting or distinct personalities. Even though Auron is a gray, scaleless (though more than once descriptions mention scales on him) and considered weak by some, his parents are proud of his unexpected dominance over both Copper and a Red brothers (girls are all greens, because heavens forfend there be anything like variety among females) - though the former is merely wounded, left to fend for himself in the crevices and cracks in the cavern corners. Scaleless he may be, but he's expected to make up for it by being quick and clever. After some dithering and further worldbuilding and dragon lore, outsiders turn up to shatter Auron's peaceful (by dragon standards) world, leaving only Auron and his sister Wistala - both too young to breathe fire or fly, with only the stories of their parents and mental images passed on from parent to child (which include some ancestral memories, sometimes; there's some plot convenience over what can and cannot be passed along mind-to-mind). Here, Wistala surprises Auron by actually being useful as they struggle to hunt and survive in the harsh world outside the caverns, while still being pursued by the humanoid hunters who destroyed their home. Maybe she will turn out to be a worthy companion and a challenge to traditional dragon roles, where females are often considered little but things to mate with and raise eggs? Not so fast; it isn't long before they split up and Auron finds himself captured by elves and dwarves. It is the first of many encounters that will shape the young drake, showing him the bad and the good of the world, in adventures that can sometimes feel clunky and forced to impart some particular wisdom or lesson upon the Gray before shoving him along to the next thing. He soon learns that not only are dragons increasingly endangered in this world, but that there may be some innate flaw in his kind being exploited by their many enemies - a flaw that one aged black dragon (who may or may not still be alive) could teach him about. Meanwhile, a threat to all intelligent beings arises in the form of a human "mage" and his fanatical drive for racial purity, a somewhat heavy-handed baddie repeating real-world xenophobic talking points in a way that many adult readers would likely roll their eyes at for being overused. Eventually, Auron's quest to save his species inevitably must run head-first into the larger threat to the world... but not before numerous side-tracks and violent, gory encounters engineered for maximum violence and gore, and some creepy moments where a maturing but lonely drake begins feeling inappropriate urges toward a human girl he helped raise after she was orphaned. (Because not only are female dragons regarded as little but mates and mothers by male dragons, but females of any species are evidently lumped into the same category...) None of this was helped by the audiobook presentation, and a narrator who, by choice or direction, made some... unusual vocal choices when voicing the characters. His efforts to make wolves howling announcements - how they communicate between packs across long distances - sound like cliché howls in particular almost made me give up on this audiobook, yet another oddly juvenile signal in a book that does not seem to have been marketed as a juvenile read and which contained content that doesn't seem to track with juvenile books, yet which always feels a step away (at most) from being a boy's adventure tale.
There are, in truth, some interesting ideas and some solid potential in Dragon Champion. Despite some anachronisms in what Auron did and did not understand about the greater world, the dragons here are beings of fire and flight and fury, often to their own detriment, and each of the species have inherent flaws that contribute to the overall chaotic, unraveling state of things. Unfortunately, the story keeps tripping itself up by being too retro in the wrong ways, offering the sheen of classic epic fantasies without the sense of solid foundation or depth, with a main character who has a way of coming across as a plot-shaped object and whom I ultimately never quite cared about, in a world that kept reminding me that, as a female reader, I really wasn't that welcome on its adventures anyway.

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou)

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
Ballantine Books
Nonfiction, Autobiography
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Long before she became known internationally for her poetry and civil rights activism (among other accomplishments), Maya Angelou was a young girl sent far away from her mother, to live in the segregated town of Stamps, Alabama with her grandmother and disabled uncle. Here, in Mama's store, with only her brother Bailey as confidant, she would learn lessons that would shape her later life.

REVIEW: I'm sufficiently ignorant and unsophisticated to only have a passing familiarity with Angelou and her works; this audiobook was another part of my admittedly-haphazard effort to patch over the innumerable knowledge holes in my brain. Given the direction of recent events, where books like this are being challenged and removed from too many public spaces (anyone who plays semantics Twister to pretend that's not actually "banning" books or throttling the spread of ideas can kindly find another book review blog to follow, thanks), I figured it was high time to try it. Displaying a poet's ability to deeply and vividly evoke a time and place and life, Angelou weaves stories of her childhood, stretching from Jim Crow Alabama to St. Louis and California as she and her brother move between homes and relatives. Along the way, she has memorable encounters with colorful characters, while also experiencing the dark, twisted legacy of racism and classism (and sexism) in their innumerable guises, plus some personal traumas. Alongside the pain and despair and rage, she also experiences moments of hope and solidarity and beauty, the many threads and experiences coming together as she grows up and begins to build a future for herself that challenges the boundaries others would put around her. It makes for an interesting, inspiring, if sometimes depressing and harsh, read... and the fact that so many in 2025 still actively seek to shut books like this away, along with the questions it forces one to ask of oneself and the things it forces one to see about the world around us, is all one needs to know about how far America has failed to progress since Angelou's youth.

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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Stephen King)

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Stephen King
Scribner
Fiction, Horror
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Nine-year-old Trisha McFarland wanted to enjoy the hike along the Appalachian Trail, one of many recent weekend outings planned by her divorced mother to rebuild a family bond with Trisha and her angry older brother Pete... but from before they left the house, Mom and Pete were fighting. They never stopped fighting, no matter how much Trisha tried to play the peacemaker, tried to swallow her own feelings and smile and defuse the tension. It's like they don't even realize she's there, listening to the terrible things they say to each other. At last, she couldn't stand it anymore. Even a quick bathroom break off the trail would be a welcome respite. She just took a few paces into the brush, far enough not to be seen by any passing day hikers.
She thought she knew the way back...
Soon, Trisha realizes that she must have taken a wrong turn - but the Appalachian Trail is wide and well traveled, and surely she can find it if she just keeps going. Only minutes become hours, and she has to admit that she's hopelessly lost in the wilderness, having few supplies in her pack and no more survival skills than scraps she's read in books or learned from a mother who was far more city than country. To keep her spirits up, she uses her Walkman to listen to radio broadcasts of her favorite baseball team, the Red Sox, and her favorite player, closing pitcher Tom Gordon. She even imagines him there with her, giving her encouragement. But when she realizes that she's not as alone as she thinks, that something of inhuman patience and malevolence stalks her, she finds herself facing a threat that not even her hero can help her escape...

REVIEW: Reading like a cross between Gary Paulsen's classic Hatchet and, well, Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon drops an ordinary girl into an extraordinary situation, one where wilderness survival is complicated by supernatural elements. Not that nature needs any help to be deceptive and deadly on its own, especially to an inexperienced kid who never anticipated anything more strenuous than the "moderate to difficult" day hike Mom planned that morning, and most especially to one already distracted by her own anxieties. Some small part of her almost wanted to get lost when she left the trail, just to get away from Mom and Pete... only Trisha never meant it so literally. From denial to determination to find her own way back to panic to practical (if scared) acceptance, Trisha makes some mistakes but tries to get her head together and think her way out of her bad situation - and that's before the animal instincts wake to alert her of her stalker, often more feeling than physical entity, which seems to be herding her deeper into the wilderness and toying with her along the way. As a coping mechanism, an inner voice - often dark, but sometimes helpful - speaks up to guide her, and her imagined companion Tom Gordon offers company that becomes more tangible as her physical and mental conditions deteriorate. As is often the case with these tales, Trisha does a lot of growing up in her time alone... though, this being Stephen King, there is no guarantee that she'll survive long enough to apply the hard-won wisdom of the wilds. Amid the terrors and failures are moments of peace and beauty, and Trisha learns to see and appreciate those, too, even as everything else goes wrong. The whole may not be top-notch Stephen King, but makes for a solid, often gruesome tale of survival and finding inner strength in unexpected places.

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Armageddon Outta Here (Derek Landy)

Armageddon Outta Here - The World of Skulduggery Pleasant: The Definitive Story Collection (So Far)
The Skulduggery Pleasant series, Book 8.5
Derek Landy
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA? Adventure/Collection/Fantasy/Horror/Humor/Mystery
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: A hardened posse of war veterans hunts a fugitive dark mage across the American Western frontier... a childhood dare involving a "haunted" house has dire consequences decades later... a man haunted by visions of a peculiar machine may be the conduit for a world-ending event... a string of seemingly random deaths is linked by a cursed pen... These and more tales explore the world and characters surrounding Dublin's infamous skeleton detective Skulduggery Pleasant and his friend and apprentice Valkyrie Cain.
This collection includes the previously-reviewed story Apocalypse Kings.

REVIEW: This collection of 22 stories is billed as 8.5 in the series, but some elements of the later tales constitute spoilers for coming events; I suspect it would fit better elsewhere in the timeline. (There are also a few that were apparently written for special events based on group participation or guest-submitted character ideas. They played out fine in Landy's tales, though my first thought was that he was flirting with the "evidently written entirely by the fans" territory that some authors venture into, and there are a few people in that particular pool that one would do better not to be around... but I digress.) Some slot into the main timeline, while others are essentially standalone side adventures, but all work quite well and maintain Landy's particular blend of humor, wonder, intrigue, horror, and tragedy.
Starting with a tale set in 1800's South Dakota and ending with events taking place after (what I presume occurs in) Book 9 (or maybe later; I'm currently only up through Book 8 in the main arc), the stories are presented roughly in chronological order. Several of them only involve the lead duo of Skulduggery and Valkyrie as side characters. A few could've been complete standalones with minor reshaping, particularly "Get Thee Behind Me, Bubba Moon", which features mortal kids inadvertently stumbling into a dark magical secret left behind by a cultist when a traditional neighborhood rite-of-passage dare goes awry; even the tone almost felt more like a standalone, more serious and introspective as the main character finds himself dealing with impossible events. Landy demonstrates his writing range across these tales, some being shorter and sillier (but never embarrassingly goofy), some being longer and much darker. Often, the tales involve tragedy in some form or another, a loss of innocence if nothing else (and it's often more than just that), reflecting how even fleeting contact with the magical world always comes with a cost, a cost often much, much greater than even willing parties anticipate. The world of Skulduggery Pleasant is not a whimsical wonderland but a shadowed realm of sharp edges and sharper teeth with roots firmly in the horror genre, even if the earlier entries lampshade those roots and there's never a shortage of humorous quips. Nobody is safe, not even innocent bystanders, and good hearts and good intentions are no guarantee of a happy ending... or even a survivable ending. The tales varied a bit but were generally strong.

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Confessions of an Imaginary Friend (Michelle Cuevas)

Confessions of an Imaginary Friend: A Memoir by Jacques Papier
Michelle Cuevas
Rocky Pond Books
Fiction, CH Fantasy/Humor
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Jacques Papier has always felt invisible; teachers ignore his raised hand, nobody picks him for teams at recess, and his parents even have to be reminded to set a place for him at the table. If not for his twin sister and best friend Fleur, he'd wonder if he even existed at all.
It isn't until he talks to the roller-skating cowgirl at the playground - a girl nobody else seems to notice - that he begins to realize that he's imaginary.
Driven to an existential (or nonexistential) crisis by this discovery, Jacques seeks out other imaginary friends as he tries to figure out just who, and what, he really is, a journey that will lead him far from his beloved sister Fleur on an adventure beyond even his own imagination.

REVIEW: Clearly inspired by the song "Puff the Magic Dragon" with some elements of Toy Story, this tale of an imaginary friend discovering his true self and purpose beyond the girl who created him is surprisingly touching while still being whimsical, exploring the ways in which imagination takes on a (literal) life of its own as it enables people to become better selves, even beyond the mind that sparked it.
Written from Jacques's point of view (and narrated with a light French accent in the audiobook version), the imaginary boy starts out feeling invisible in the way children often do, only it's clear to everyone but Jacques that there's more to it than that. Still, Fleur has more than enough love and belief to sustain them both... which is why, in addition to being increasingly upset by how he's overlooked, Jacques becomes very cross when he overhears their parents talking behind closed doors, concerned about Fleur's imaginary friend. She never kept secrets from him before - he knows because they keep a detailed map of their world, and all the secrets they've discovered in it. Nowhere on that map is a place for an imaginary friend! In retaliation, he tries to come up with his own imaginary friend, a dragon-herring, which doesn't go well and leads to a tipping point where the Papiers demand Fleur get rid of her nonexistent brother. (This, in turn, ends up leading to a psychiatrist when Fleur decides that Jacques is no more invisible and imaginary than she herself feels, and goes to extreme lengths to prove her own nonexistence to her skeptical parents.) Forced to confront his own reality, Jacques finds a community of other imaginary friends, and comes to understand that his kind can be both a help and a hindrance to the children they're with; some are just playmates, but others are signs of deeper problems, more enablers than healers, and not all of them are helpful, as he learns the hard way when he sets out on his own on the dubious word of another imaginary being. Through a series of mostly-amusing adventures and child companions, all of which involve some reinvention of himself, Jacques learns what it means to be an embodiment of imagination, and just what kind of friend he is meant to be. The ending kicked the rating up a half-notch with a moment of pure wonder and beauty (and a much better ending than the song that inspired the protagonist's name).

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Bury Your Gays (Chuck Tingle)

Bury Your Gays
Chuck Tingle
Tor Nightfire
Fiction, Horror/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Growing up, Misha never could've imagined he'd find success as a Hollywood screenwriter, but now - with a rising career penning horror movies and TV shows and an Oscar nomination for a live-action short - his dreams are coming true... almost. Deep down, he's still the scared boy who can't even come out of the closet to his family, though he's been dating Zeke for over a year and his works are heavily queer-coded. At its heart, though, the film industry still clings to traditional ideas, particularly the notion that openly gay characters don't get happy endings... thus, his latest argument with his agent over his hit supernatural show Travelers, when he's ordered to either closet the lead detective duo or kill them off in the season finale. Misha has invested too much of himself in the storyline to betray the characters (and the audience) like that; it's too much like betraying himself and the boy he used to be, who longed to see people like himself on TV. Thus, he fails to heed his agent's warnings about the consequences of defying the studio board - and that is when things start going very, very wrong for him, as monsters out of his own works begin stalking him.
Is it an elaborate hoax or particularly committed stalker? Is his mind cracking? Or is he up against something far more dangerous and powerful than he can imagine?

REVIEW: The entertainment industry can be downright brutal, moreso for those who lie outside the norms and push the wrong envelopes in the wrong (read: likely to lose money) way. As shareholders and algorithms gain power over more and more aspects of creativity and output, it becomes even more brutal, to the point where original ideas and outlier voices are nearly eliminated (see also: why everything seems to be a remake or reboot or lightly-redressed version of the same stuff). Even when Hollywood appears to make progress on issues like LGBTQIA+ representation, that progress is often little more than window dressing, and all too often the maxim of "bury your gays" - eliminating non-straight characters, not allowing them to lead or have happy endings - seems to hold true. Here, Tingle presents one half-closeted creator who dares stand up for himself and his artistic freedom, only to find out the hard way how little the system (and the studio's bottom line) tolerates defiance by the people it sees as mere profit-generating property.
From the start, there's an ominous air as Misha drives into the Harold Brothers studio lot for his meeting with his agent. On the one hand, he seems to be living the dream of countless would-be creators who come to Los Angeles in general and the dream of the boy he used to be in particular, the one who grew up watching Harold Brothers cartoons and popular TV shows and started telling stories to himself to get through the hardest times of his life. On the other, the feeling of something off-kilter, something even predatory, sets in early, even before he gets the news from his agent that he's being ordered to ax the queer love story he's been slowly laying the groundwork for in his TV series that's meant to come out in the open with the season finale, and if he won't ax the story, he has to ax the characters living it. He grew up watching Hollywood tease audiences with "queer-baiting" only to weasel out of their own plot developments and clear story beats, betrayals that left a very bitter taste in the mouth of a boy who was still figuring out his sexuality but knew on an instinctive level that a punch had been deliberately pulled - or, rather, the punch had been redirected into his face, and the faces of a good chunk of the viewing audience, by studios that consider queer viewers lucrative enough to string along but not lucrative enough to openly validate or embrace. Most of the horror stories Misha pens, the ones that built his career, have roots in his past, and seeing them come to life on screens big and small has been a triumph, but an incomplete one if he's not allowed to follow through on the stories that are most important to him, such as the relationship at the heart of his popular TV show. He knows defiance will have a cost, even for a current studio darling (his Oscar nomination makes him a temporary golden boy), but is too furious to consider how steep that cost might be... and even then, he can't begin to imagine the collateral damage to his friends and even total strangers who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, as his own monsters appear to be coming to life around him.
Even as Misha finds himself literally fighting a system that wants to erase, or defang and minimize, certain ideas and content, he also must confront an industry that seems intent on erasing humans from the creative equation altogether; in the first scene, as he enters the studio lot, he watches a big poster going up advertising a blockbuster movie starring an actor who died three years ago - an actor whose performance was created entirely from CGI and AI via a secret proprietary process, and the first such performance to earn an Oscar nomination. The fact that the actor in question would never have played a villain role when alive only makes it that much more of a betrayal to the spirit of the late artist, a dismissal of humanity in favor of marketing and dollar signs... one that audiences and academy voters seem all too willing to validate. The decision to kill the core storyline on Misha's show is also spurred by the number-crunchers on the nebulous board of directors behind the studio, based on algorithms and projected demographic appeals and other data points and analytics and other ways to maximize shareholder returns while minimizing actual creativity and humanity. By refusal to comply, Misha becomes a threat to the bottom line, and soon learns that even a proven track record of popularity and profitability is no shield from a board that smells a chance at even more profit (and hardly wants to encourage defiance in any of its property - Misha and the rest of the creators and actors and other employees being mere objects of little more consequence than office chairs or potted plants). Facing a rising tide of horror that threatens his safety and his sanity, he must dig deep into his own convictions and his own reasons for creating art in the first place, as well as learn to trust his friends; just as movies take a team to create, Misha will need a team if he is to survive the horror movie that his life quickly becomes.
Things move fairly well, and even the few lulls are filled with tension and backstory to fill things out. There are several twists and (often dark) turns, and some real pain revealed in both the here-and-now events and Misha's backstory, the events that led to him using horror as a medium to explore and process traumas. His friends sometimes feel a little flat and convenient, but ultimately form a decently solid team, though Misha must ultimately be the one to drive things forward, even through his failures. Along the way, Tingle plays with horror tropes, sometimes turning them on their ear and sometimes having Misha's attempts to outsmart them falling apart as he underestimates the forces set against him. It ends on a solid and satisfactory note.

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The Relentless Legion (J. S. Dewes)

The Relentless Legion
The Divide series, Book 1
J. S. Dewes
Tor
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Once, Adequin Rake thought the greatest threat to humanity was the collapse of the known universe beyond the frontier of the Divide. Now, a greater threat might lie within the Core worlds, embodied in the megalomaniacal monarch Augustus Mercer. His increasingly fanatical attempts to purge humanity of the alien mutagen unleashed generations ago by the (mostly) vanished Viators have led to the creation of a bioweapon that will kill anyone bearing any trace of genetic contamination - a death toll that could eliminate over half the population, followed by equally monstrous projects to rebuild the species to Mercer's own vision of purity. With the exiled Sentinels and her trusted crew and allies, including Mercer's estranged grandson/failed clone Cavalon, the smuggler Corsairs, and the secret Viator tech in her upgraded atlas navigation system, Rake races to get ahead of Mercer's plot and engineer a cure for the mutagen... and, hopefully, rescue crewmate Jackin from their enemy's clutches before it's too late for his sanity, or his life.

REVIEW: I enjoyed the previous two installments of the Divide trilogy, but for some reason I didn't quite engage with this final(?) volume. Maybe it's just been too long since I read the others. Or maybe it was a vague sense that, for all the sometimes-breakneck action and plot twists and betrayals and revelations, it sometimes felt like it was trying too hard to pack in emotional gut-punches and surprises.
It picks up with little lag time, with Rake, Cavalon, and the captive Jackin all up to their necks (and over their heads) in the general chaos of both protecting the galaxy from the oncoming collapse of the known universe and keeping humans from finishing what the Viators started and exterminating themselves, this time under the increasingly powerful grip of Augustus Mercer and his eugenics-driven vision for the future... all while further burdened by emotional and physical scars from previous battles and failures and lives that went to Hell long before the current problems and secrets were dropped on their shoulders. That's an awful lot of plates to keep spinning, and more than once I felt attention whiplash as the story moved from one plate to another, from one frying pan to another fire. The many threads and threats from the previous installments are given little to no recap for the reader coming into things after a break, and it took me some time to settle back into something like a groove... and even then, I often felt like I was a few steps behind the plot as it raced ahead. Maybe that's why a few twists and events felt like they arrived out of nowhere to either complicate problems or offer a solution (and/or deliver fresh psychological wounds to further complicate character interactions). It builds up to a suitably explosive finale, one with some hooks left dangling for continuations (I'm reasonably certain this is just intended to be a trilogy, but it wouldn't be the first time a "trilogy" generated more volumes) but which wraps up most of the main issues and sets surviving characters on new trajectories, having grown and changed significantly since the reader first met them.
While there was a fair bit to enjoy and the story could never be said to lag, I just kept feeling that, for all the racing I did to keep up and re-immerse in the series and keep up with the many characters and plot threads whipping past, I never quite caught up as the story kept sprinting ahead of me, leading to a slight dip in the rating.

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Blood of the Old Kings (Sung-il Kim)

Blood of the Old Kings
The Bleeding Empire series, Book 1
Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur
Tor
Fiction, Fantasy
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Long ago, the Empire rose to power on a wave of blood and necromancy, using the corpses of sorcerers to power an array of war machines and other technology. The old kings were thrown down, the old nations subjugated, the old ways and magic lore destroyed, and every child tested for magic potential, to be taken away and eventually serve as power sources. But not all rest easy under the imperial boots that crush them...
Loran was an ordinary peasant woman in the conquered nation of Arland, until her husband and daughter were slaughtered by the Empire for "treason": singing a simple song to commemorate fallen heroes of days past. Driven by rage, grief, and desperation, she casts herself into the volcano where a great dragon lies bound, the dragon who was once companion to Arland's fallen king. She may have no royal blood, but vows to become king and avenge the deaths of her loved ones, and every Arlander who has fallen to the Empire. Thus the dragon grants her a sword made from its own fang, at the cost of one eye - a sword that grants powers and burdens she does not yet understand, but which may forge a legend for the ages, if she has the courage to wield them.
As a resident of the imperial Capital, the young man Cain feels no strong ties to his native Arland and little outright animosity towards the Empire. Instead, he uses his cleverness and many connections to help out others who, like him, come to the city with little but the clothes on their backs, trying to make new lives for themselves in a complicated place. When his friend and former mentor Fienna is found murdered, Cain sets out to discover the culprit, only to find himself chasing a plot that could destroy the Capital and strike a mortal wound to the very heart of the land.
Arienne was taken to the Imperial Academy when she was just ten years old after she was determined to have the potential for magic in her blood. Here, she's taught little that could actually be called magic, just enough to potentially make her useful as a sorcerer engineer designing Imperial machinery, before her eventual fate as a Power generator after death. It's not a future she wants, but not one she sees a way out of... until a voice starts talking to her, offering bits of real magic even as it convinces her to break into a forbidden chamber in the Academy and thence escape... now bearing the living corpse of a dead sorcerer in a room inside her mind. She does not trust Eldred, but she cannot deny that she needs his help, especially when rumors reach her of an upstart would-be king stirring up trouble in her former homeland of Arland.

REVIEW: With some interesting imagery and different cultural roots (being translated from a Korean novel), Blood of the Old Kings was a novel I felt like I should have enjoyed. At times, I did enjoy it. But the more it wound on, the less I cared about it or its characters or world, until I realized I was just listening to reach the end and not out of any particular emotional investment.
The opening is quite strong, as common-born Loran dares to confront the bound royal dragon of Arland in its volcanic prison, making a vow she has no idea how she will keep but unable to stand by meekly while the Empire continues to bleed the life and hope from the land. Her sacrifice of an eye allows the dragon to share her vision and speak in her mind, as well as granting other powers that increasingly bind her to the great being as she sets out to fulfill her apparent destiny. Destiny becomes a big driving factor of much that unfolds, to the point of almost becoming a deus ex machina to see characters through impossible situations, but early on it's just a slight background noise under the main stories. The reader, in turn, meets the young problem-solving city dweller Cain, who doesn't particularly care for politics or the various lands crushed by the Empire so much as how it personally affects him and the city he now calls home, as well as the people in it, and also the runaway sorcery student Arienne as she breaks into the hidden chamber and "rescues" the corpse of Eldred... having to step past the skeletal remains of another student who heard the dead sorcerer's call and failed in the task. They each have different but ultimately vital roles to play in the events that unfold, all driven by the currents of destiny... and all somehow feeling strangely like the plot of an anime or maybe manga series, somewhat exaggerated and orchestrated to create visual and emotional spectacle in increasing escalation to near-godlike stakes where nothing really seems to matter because destiny has dictated it all anyway (though I'm sure it would look awesome in an illustration or animated). There's something oddly episodic about it, as it keeps reminding the reader of events and revelations that occurred barely a chapter or scene previously, and again later on, as though it had been originally released in serialized installments. The characters also become more exaggerated and less grounded as the stakes raise around them, their speech and actions becoming more grandiose. The story itself has some interesting turns and worldbuilding; it's not quite so simple as the Empire being bad and the old kings being good. But at some point I realized I just wasn't connecting with the characters or the world they lived in, as they seemed less and less real to me and more like caricatures going through stylized motions. The ending feels like a letdown, driving home how much destiny was ultimately more in control than the actions or inactions of any of the characters, which ultimately dropped the whole experience into the three-star Okay territory. It just wasn't my cup of cocoa, though there were parts and moments that worked well.

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Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear (Seanan McGuire)

Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear
The Wayward Children series, Book 10
Seanan McGuire
Tor
Fiction, YA? Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Born to a mother who fled the hospital without even giving her a name, Nadya was raised by Mother Russia in an orphanage along with other unwanted children. She may have had only one full arm at birth, but never missed what she never had, never saw herself as lesser or weaker, not even when the foreign couple arrived and whisked her off to the faraway land of Colorado - that is, until her new "parents" fit her with a prosthetic arm. It's clumsy, it's painful, it's heavy, and it's not something she needed or even asked for... but, then, what she wants or needs doesn't seem to matter, not to people who seem more in love with a concept of a daughter than the real girl they carried halfway around the world from her home. One of her few solaces is the turtle pond near her home. The turtles never judge her, never tell her she's incomplete or wrong.
It's because of the turtles that she falls through the door beneath the pond.
One moment, she's plunging beneath the murky waters. The next, she finds herself by the banks of a great river - facing a massive, malevolent frog that devours her false arm in one snap and nearly does the same to her before she flees. A kindly talking fox leads her to another river, where she meets the people of Belyyreka - a people who keep great speaking turtles as companions and have a city beneath the waters of the vast River Wild. As a Drowned Girl, she has been welcomed into their society, and soon feels more at home here than ever she did in America or even Russia. But she is still young, still wild and unsettled and prone to push and prod at boundaries, and still a child from beyond a door - and, amid the dangerous currents and lurking monsters and strange rivers, the world she left behind may still someday come calling for her again.

REVIEW: I've been enjoying the "origin" tales in this series a bit more than the main arc books, and this is another interesting, sometimes emotional backstory of a student from Eleanor West's boarding school for former portal adventurers, the girl Nadya. Rejected at birth by a young woman who never wanted to be a mother, let alone a mother to a one-armed child, she refuses to be bent or broken or made to feel less by anyone, for all that she still feels the lack of love and family keenly. At first, she has hopes that the American couple who adopt her might become a family, and she forms a slight bond with her father, but soon realizes the truth behind her adoption, the role she was acquired to fill - both a loving, perfect daughter and a grateful foreign orphan to parade before their church peers. Since she happened to not have a full complement of arms, well, her "loving" parents will fix that, too, and surely she'll be overflowing with gratitude and devotion for them then! Themes of ableism underlie the tale (not to mention themes of cultural prejudices), as Nadya becomes the companion of a Belyyreka turtle with a cracked shell who has also been told just what they can and cannot do because of their "disability". The world of the rivers is intriguing, a place of different layers and densities of water, some of which can be breathed as air (the whole world itself is beneath the waters of a vast lake), others of which will drown a person as easily as water on Earth; the turtles can swim through it all, so they essentially fly about the city, and carry boats and people up to the surface of the river as well as down below. I enjoyed it, though the end felt a bit abrupt and it lacked some of the heft and depth of a few earlier series entries, if that makes any sense.

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Last Stand of Dead Men (Derek Landy)

Last Stand of Dead Men
The Skulduggery Pleasant series, Book 8
Derek Landy
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA Adventure/Fantasy/Horror/Humor/Mystery
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: After narrowly defeating the latest threat to the world in the form of Argeddion and his mad plan to grant nearly limitless magic to the entire mortal population of Earth, the Irish Sanctuary had hoped to finally be free from the scrutiny of the Supreme Council of other magical sanctuaries, who see the recent chaos in their part of the world as a threat to the entire magical community. Unfortunately, they thought wrong. Saboteurs are caught trying to destroy the Accelerator, the machine used to artificially boost sorcerous powers - saboteurs with ties to the Supreme Council itself, an apparent bid for a complete takeover of the Irish mages by outsiders who have long coveted the land as a natural cradle of magic. Even as they grapple with this threat, someone has been stirring up the warlocks and the witches against mortals. Skulduggery and Valkyrie are sent to investigate the warlock problem - a dangerous mission, especially with the cold, dark voice in Valkyrie's head, the nigh-unstoppable Darquesse who is prophesied to destroy the world, growing more insistent every day...

REVIEW: This series just keeps on ticking and does not stop... In another astounding installment packed with twists, turns, action, wonder, danger, and humor, Valkyrie Cain and Skulduggery Pleasant once more stand between the world and utter destruction - but, as the cast and the threats have grown, they are not alone. Other players have equally pivotal roles, both in dealing with the impending threat of a warlock invasion and in the Sanctuary war that's about to kick off in a big way. Everyone has grown and changed through the series - even "Stephanie", the malfunctioning reflection used by Valkyrie to cover for her many absences from her mundane mortal life and family, which has become self-aware enough to covet the girl's existence and take drastic measures to be with them... and self-aware enough to defend her family, even when the threat is Valkyrie herself. Other returning characters include the one-time would-be "zombie king" Scapegrace and his inept minion Thrasher, who again risk being one-note comic relief characters but who also undergo some transformations of their own, and the dogged mortal reporter Kenny who first stumbled across evidence of the existence of magic a few books back and refuses to let go of the story of a lifetime, even when it plunges him into the middle of an all-out mage war. By the end, the cast has undergone some notable alterations (skirting spoilers with that vague phrase) and the story has been set on a new trajectory. I expect I won't be waiting another month to space out this series like I have been; I have to know what happens next...
(In tangentially related developments, I'll be undergoing my own notable alteration in the coming months regarding employment, which will likely leave me with less audiobook time as so much of my listening happens at work; I don't know if I'll have a chance to clear the whole series by the time that takes effect or not, but I'll be doing my level best to try. 2025 just has to destroy everything remotely decent and stable in my existence, apparently.)

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