The Ghost of Hexes Past by Lou Wilham was a lot of fun! It's the sequel to The Hex Next Door. Rus and Az are now trying to set up their own coven in Moondale.
This tome mixes magic & technology, action, supernatural politics and romance. It also expands the worldbuilding of the Bay of the Dead Verse (which will group the Witches of Moondale, [Vampire] Hunters of Ironport and Fae of Eventide series).
There is major f/f, as well as background f/m/nb. There's a young trans man, whose transness is not mentioned in this tome, but if you've read Book 1, you know.
(basically the voting was extended due to support for the Palestine global strike 🍉💪)
oh boy.
The #QIAwards are OPEN FOR VOTING
and MY BOOK IS UP THERE :O :O :O
Whoever put it up for these categories, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for nominating me! ESPECIALLY WHOEVER PUT KESTREL & ELIJAH FOR BEST CHARACTERS✨
Whoever put it up for these categories, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for nominating me! ESPECIALLY WHOEVER PUT KESTREL & ELIJAH FOR BEST CHARACTERS✨
I am having Book Grief: an achingly good book made me cry and I want so badly to share it with people but there is one problem—only a stupidly small number of people can actually read it.
I finished reading Fuck, Fuck, Fuck by Linn Strømsborg and there's no English rights for it yet, I'm half tempted to just email the publishers and spill my heart out and hope and hope there will be a deal in future and hey if they need a translator there is a writer right here who is enthusiastic af and oh man I just want to rant to my intl friends about it because more people need to read this thing and I'm angry on behalf of every woman who has sat down last at the dinner table because she has been fixing everyone else's food.
Remember that equality/equity cartoon? Where they're standing on the boxes to try see over the fence?
We understand that the best solution is to remove the entire fence, that much is apparent. But please do not condemn us disabled folks to suffer in the weeds while we're working on tearing the fence down.
fyi things like insulin, hearing aids, wheelchairs, glasses costing money at all is a form of structural ableism
Whoever put it up for these categories, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for nominating me! ESPECIALLY WHOEVER PUT KESTREL & ELIJAH FOR BEST CHARACTERS✨
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca, The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, and The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix are the queer/bipoc/feminist horror picks I've been eyeing up since the autumn.
The Ballad of Septimus Mak is an indie pagan adventure I've been dying to read from Julian M. Miles (go support him, also his indie publisher is called Lizards of the Host, which I love).
The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins is a culty horror that I mostly got to satisfy a Gundam brainworm of mine.
Finally, It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover I got because I liked the first chapter and I like stories about escaping abusive relationships. Can't wait to make up my own mind about this one.
My favorite ultra-specific character type is "this fucked up little man clearly just needs a consensual BDSM relationship and some therapy and he'd be fine, but that is very much not what happens in this story."
When I was younger, there was this railway station
It was one stop past the main town, where everyone worked. Nobody ever bothered to stay on the train past that point. Nobody needed to. Everything we wanted everything we needed was in the city, why go to that elusive sequestered stop beyond?
Daily life is monotonous. How can it not be? You have a rhythm you find a rhythm and you use it to survive and it becomes a necessity until the point comes where even changing one beat to the bar would ruin your paycheck your mortgage your grocery budget your insurance. before you know it, you are entrenched. Sure, you could break out. But would it be worth it? You know what hunger feels like.
So nobody ever takes the train on to the sequestered stop. I never even learned what that village looks like, until one night I ended up there drunk, I'd missed my stop after a night out partying in Oxford, I had never expected I'd cross the threshhold to the farplane the underdark the mirrorverse the upside down under such a condition. But there I was. And it was just like any other place, but silent, unresponsive to my state of need.
I think this is my way of explaining why I don't have a year review. It's the year of my debut novel. But I remain the same. Performing an exercise in telling without truly telling. The patterns that bind me, bind me still.
I like to hold on to the idea of the station one stop beyond my own. But it makes me sad to think about it.