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#amreading

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Hawksquill

Book 9 of 2025

Blood Over Bright Haven by M. L. Wang

3 stars

This was a slightly better version of Babel by R. F. Kuang with more of a focus on intersectionality, but it still wasn't fully satisfying. Despite not being marketed as YA, it felt very YA in terms of prose and romance. A little too Baby's First Anti-Colonialist and Anti-Capitalist Fantasy for my taste (but maybe I've just been spoiled by Ursula K. Le Guin). I picked this up because I read a review that compared it to Le Guin, actually, but I'm afraid there's really no comparison.

The setting is certainly imaginative and it is fairly radical in its politics. Compared to Babel, I think it's an interesting choice to have a protagonist who's an ambitious, white feminist, girl boss-y woman who has never considered her complicity in the colonial project before. But Wang is really hamfisted in the same way Kuang is, with entire chapters devoted to hand-holding passages explaining basic concepts like false allyship, capitalist extraction, and white guilt without much subtlety or anything that makes it feel transformative or insightful.

@bookstodon #Bookstodon #Books #BookReview #Reading #AmReading #Fantasy

Cover of Blood Over Bright Haven. A golden spellograph (a magical typewriter used to compose magical spells) with a large circular window or mirror attached to the top of it. In the window is an abstract flame-like pattern in blood red.
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Reading Recluse

📘 "The Gods Lie" by Kaori Ozaki

From a manga high to a manga low... This title has so many enthusiastic reviews, I kind of expected a good tear-jerker. What I got instead is a sad story about a severely neglected girl, through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy who isn't mature enough to deal with it, which gives an awkward story that I disliked a lot. There's an extra (strange) twist thrown in for shock value, which felt like misery for misery's sake. What also didn't help is that the boy likes to fondle his mothers' breasts for comfort (yeah, no comment).

I really wanted better for the girl, but instead she's stuck playing house with this random boy, while it's portrayed as if he's saving her. Her only dream is becoming a good bride. In the end she has an inspirational dream. About herself, her future? No, about him succeeding in his goals.

Reading this made me feel icky. A big 'no, thanks.'

Book cover of 'the gods lie'. It's an illustration of a boy and girl, holding hands, standing behind some pink flowers, in front of a train passing by on a bridge. They're both looking off into the distance, above the viewer. The boy is in a soccer shirt, the girl is in a yukata with a flower in her hair. The sky is blue with some purple clouds. The title is at the top of the cover.
#AmReading
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Kolya's Wonderarium

Traitor General is a good book. The Gaunt's Ghosts series does keep getting better. I have stopped comparing him to the only other commissar I had liked before him.

Its a stealth mission and they do absolutely crush it and they build up this whole resistance movement, blow up a bunch of stuff and, sure, none of them die, but that comes to more of a #40k thing. Guilliman doesnt have plot armor. Its called the Armour of Destiny. Deus ex Machina just means the Omnissiah #amReading @bookstodon

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