Summer reading
Aug. 10th, 2025 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I've been terrible about logging my reading (and to be honest, comparatively slow in terms of the number of books actually read), so this is a mega round up representing the past couple of months. Most of these books were read on trains (to holidays, or on my commute to work), on ferries, or on planes — in other words, as I was getting from A to B. Opportunities to just sit down and read in an uninterrupted manner have been rare (until this weekend, but more on that in a later post).
Strong Roots (Olia Hercules)
Hercules is a chef, food writer and activist well known in the UK food scene and Ukrainian dispora. She's already published a number of cookbooks, and Strong Roots is her first departure from that oeuvre — a book that blends memoir with family history and the broader 20th and 21st century history of Ukrainians and Ukraine. It's an incredibly compelling narrative, weaving together threads of resilience, trauma, memory and survival into a coherent whole, melding the personal, familial and national seamlessly. As with any people who have lived through multiple wars, famines, waves of occupation and totalitarian repression, Hercules's family story is full of incredible incidents that would feel unbelievably improbable in a work of fiction; it reminded me in many ways of Jung Chang's Wild Swans, a similarly multigenerational memoir in which the author and various family members witness and experience an extraordinary sweep of history and rapid change, living in 'interesting times' whether they chose to do so or not. And, of course, Strong Roots is also about food, and feeding people, and how cooking and eating and preserving recipes can be an act of resistance.
Blood over Bright Haven (ML Wang)
This is fantasy academia story whose protagonist strives desperately to ascend to the prestigious (and, until her arrival, male-only) heights of elite academic magic, only to discover the exploitative, xenophobic and monstrous roots on which this magic — and the wealth and security it brings her city and its people — rests. As she and her unlikely allies uncover this horrifying truth, they then must grapple with how to respond to it — and full points to ML Wang for the choices these characters actually make in the book's explosive denouement. This is truly a fantasy world in which the old cliché of magic coming with a price feels wholly apt, and the author pulls no punches and allows the characters no easy ways out in this regard. However, I felt the book was about as subtle as an anvil to the head (much like Kuang's Babel, without the patronisingly lecturing authorial footnotes), and the reveal of the reality behind the magic would have come as no surprise to anyone even glancingly familiar with the trajectory of SFF literature (or the social media conversations around it) over the past fifteen years.
Fable for the End of the World (Ava Reid)
This is Reid's loving homage to the 2010s dystopian YA of her youth, with a F/F enemies-to-lovers romance at its heart. As in many of the book's antecedents, the historical background leading up to her totalitarian dystopian United States and justification for its televised state-sanctioned hunting and murdering of selected individuals is somewhat flimsy — which caused my less than enthusiastic reception of this subgenre at the time, and has left me feeling no more warmly towards it in Reid's 2025 revival. Likewise, I always felt that the American 2010s dystopian fiction pulled its punches (yes, including the Hunger Games trilogy) in comparison to other dystopian YA with which I'd grown up, and I'd say the same is true here. Although Reid's romantic pair are genuine enemies with irreconcilable ideological differences (and are literally locked in a situation in which one must kill the other with no compromises possible), it's made clear pretty early on that one character is merely misguided and will likely change her position as soon as she is made aware of the full picture, which reduces the tension somewhat — there is never any feeling of genuine risk or peril. I had high hopes for Reid when I read her first two books (which struck me as interesting and full of potential for her development as a writer), but I have to admit that each book since then has been an increasing disappointment.
The Raven Scholar (Antonia Hodgson)
This is a grimdark secondary world epic fantasy in which a group of characters compete in a deadly series of games in order to become the land's next ruler (they live in a culture in which the emperor steps down after a set number of years of rule have passed). I absolutely loved this — it was just old school political and interpersonal machinations done incredibly well, with a rich and fun worldbuilding and interesting characters who made plausibly tragic choices. It was grim and horrifying enough to rival GRRM at his best, but was so refreshingly obviously the work of a woman (meaning zero sexual or sexualised violence, and equal opportunity when it came to the awful consequences experienced by various characters). I remember recoiling in visceral distaste from other highly recommended 'grimdark-by-woman' books (Kameron Hurley, I'm looking at you), but this one really worked for me, and I found it genuinely surprising in terms of its quality.
Sargassa (Sophie Burnham)
This is an alternative history Roman-Empire-in-our-time (and specifically on the North American continent) story, and it was a book that I'd highly anticipated. I loved every facet of it — the way society looked, the way characters thought and acted, and how it felt plausibly realistic in terms of the different trajectory the history of their world had taken, the ways power, powerlessness, exploitation and inequality looked in this alternative world — and found it engrossing and well thought-through ... until the very final moments. This was when the explanation for the Roman-ness of the world was provided for the characters and the reader, and it was so stupid and unbelievable that the whole impressive edifice of the book came crashing down. Up until that point, I was close to giving Sargassa the highest five-star rating, but that reveal undermined everything that had come before.
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (VE Schwab)
This book is a vampire story from the points of view of three women-turned-vampires at different, though interweaving points in time. As with many vampire stories, it's a love story, a story of vampirisim as a metaphor for queerness (and in this case freedom from societal misogyny as well), and a horror story. I liked it well enough, but I felt that apart from the fact that all the point-of-view characters were women and lesbians, it really didn't do anything that Anne Rice hadn't done already, and done better.
Court of Wanderers (Rin Chupeco)
This book concludes Chupeco's vampire fantasy/romance duology which began with Silver Over Nightfall. I enjoyed the first book a lot — it was very silly and self-indulgent in a way that lined up well with my tastes — but the second was quite underwhelming, and I can't really recommend it.
The Incandescant (Emily Tesh)
I feel certain that Tesh can't have been the first person to write a magical school novel from the perspective of the teachers, and yet much of the commentary around this book seems to focus on this fact. In any case, this element — the elite British boarding school in which magic is just a subject taught alongside more pedestrian subjects, the mundanity of lesson planning and risk assessments (when the day's lesson involves summoning demons), the perspective of a jaded thirtysomething teacher on her charges' teenage reletionship melodrama, staff room politics, A Levels and university applications — is done incredibly well, with the knowledgeable affection of an author clearly highly familiar with UK secondary school teaching in the private sector. I loved this aspect of the book, and wished that it could have remained as low-stakes and episodic as this for its entirety, whereas unfortunately Tesh felt the urge to up the stakes about three-quarters of the way through and abruptly change course into what felt like a wholly different novel, with a villain who was at once as obvious as a flashing light, and with motives that were never made clear.
Six Wild Crowns (Holly Race)
This is a fantasy retelling of the story of Henry VIII and his six wives, in a setting in which the kingdom's magic requires its king to be polygamous and married to six queens at once, each in her own designated castle. The novel's Anne Boleyn equivalent grows suspicious of this set up, and, with some effort manages to join forces with some of her fellow queens to uncover the truth. The reveal will be nothing suprising if you are well read in certain types of female character-centric fantasy novels that were my bread and butter growing up (I won't spoil it here but am happy to do so in the comments), but I liked the directions in which Race took the familiar Tudor characters and found the book an enjoyable ride as a whole.
The Rose Apple Tree Mystery (Ovidia Yu)
This is the latest in Yu's series of historical mysteries set in Singapore during British colonisation, then Japanese occupation, and then the return of British rule. This ninth book takes place in a mountain resort, where her delightfully pragmatic protagonist, Su-Lin, and her British police chief colleague-turned-husband have been sent, ostensibly for their honeymoon but in reality to look into some suspicious deaths. Bad weather traps them with a collection of disreputible people, all (of course) with something to hide, as more murders and disappearances take place, and Su-Lin must solve a locked room mystery. I love this series — it's written with warmth and wry affection, and the setting and characters are always a lot of fun.
Fledgling (Octavia Butler)
This vampire novel (seems to have been something of a theme for me this summer) is Butler's last, and grapples with a lot of her pet themes: the fine line between symbiosis and exploitation, relationships with extreme power imbalances, anti-black racism in the United States and how it might find expression even in fantastical or supernatural settings, and unconventional familial and societal organisation and ways of living. This is now the sixth book by Butler that I've read this year, and I have to conclude at this point that her ideas are really interesting (and her commitment to taking them to their ugliest, but most logical extreme is amazing), and her writing itself (in the sense of the words on the page) I find very pedestrian and lifeless. We learn characters' feelings and motivations in bursts of infodumping, and otherwise the books read almost like news aggregators' journalism: this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. This, far more than the visceral strangeness of Butler's scenarios, served to keep me at an extreme emotional distance from the characters and the fictional events unfolding in every book, and Fledgling was no different.
Strong Roots (Olia Hercules)
Hercules is a chef, food writer and activist well known in the UK food scene and Ukrainian dispora. She's already published a number of cookbooks, and Strong Roots is her first departure from that oeuvre — a book that blends memoir with family history and the broader 20th and 21st century history of Ukrainians and Ukraine. It's an incredibly compelling narrative, weaving together threads of resilience, trauma, memory and survival into a coherent whole, melding the personal, familial and national seamlessly. As with any people who have lived through multiple wars, famines, waves of occupation and totalitarian repression, Hercules's family story is full of incredible incidents that would feel unbelievably improbable in a work of fiction; it reminded me in many ways of Jung Chang's Wild Swans, a similarly multigenerational memoir in which the author and various family members witness and experience an extraordinary sweep of history and rapid change, living in 'interesting times' whether they chose to do so or not. And, of course, Strong Roots is also about food, and feeding people, and how cooking and eating and preserving recipes can be an act of resistance.
Blood over Bright Haven (ML Wang)
This is fantasy academia story whose protagonist strives desperately to ascend to the prestigious (and, until her arrival, male-only) heights of elite academic magic, only to discover the exploitative, xenophobic and monstrous roots on which this magic — and the wealth and security it brings her city and its people — rests. As she and her unlikely allies uncover this horrifying truth, they then must grapple with how to respond to it — and full points to ML Wang for the choices these characters actually make in the book's explosive denouement. This is truly a fantasy world in which the old cliché of magic coming with a price feels wholly apt, and the author pulls no punches and allows the characters no easy ways out in this regard. However, I felt the book was about as subtle as an anvil to the head (much like Kuang's Babel, without the patronisingly lecturing authorial footnotes), and the reveal of the reality behind the magic would have come as no surprise to anyone even glancingly familiar with the trajectory of SFF literature (or the social media conversations around it) over the past fifteen years.
Fable for the End of the World (Ava Reid)
This is Reid's loving homage to the 2010s dystopian YA of her youth, with a F/F enemies-to-lovers romance at its heart. As in many of the book's antecedents, the historical background leading up to her totalitarian dystopian United States and justification for its televised state-sanctioned hunting and murdering of selected individuals is somewhat flimsy — which caused my less than enthusiastic reception of this subgenre at the time, and has left me feeling no more warmly towards it in Reid's 2025 revival. Likewise, I always felt that the American 2010s dystopian fiction pulled its punches (yes, including the Hunger Games trilogy) in comparison to other dystopian YA with which I'd grown up, and I'd say the same is true here. Although Reid's romantic pair are genuine enemies with irreconcilable ideological differences (and are literally locked in a situation in which one must kill the other with no compromises possible), it's made clear pretty early on that one character is merely misguided and will likely change her position as soon as she is made aware of the full picture, which reduces the tension somewhat — there is never any feeling of genuine risk or peril. I had high hopes for Reid when I read her first two books (which struck me as interesting and full of potential for her development as a writer), but I have to admit that each book since then has been an increasing disappointment.
The Raven Scholar (Antonia Hodgson)
This is a grimdark secondary world epic fantasy in which a group of characters compete in a deadly series of games in order to become the land's next ruler (they live in a culture in which the emperor steps down after a set number of years of rule have passed). I absolutely loved this — it was just old school political and interpersonal machinations done incredibly well, with a rich and fun worldbuilding and interesting characters who made plausibly tragic choices. It was grim and horrifying enough to rival GRRM at his best, but was so refreshingly obviously the work of a woman (meaning zero sexual or sexualised violence, and equal opportunity when it came to the awful consequences experienced by various characters). I remember recoiling in visceral distaste from other highly recommended 'grimdark-by-woman' books (Kameron Hurley, I'm looking at you), but this one really worked for me, and I found it genuinely surprising in terms of its quality.
Sargassa (Sophie Burnham)
This is an alternative history Roman-Empire-in-our-time (and specifically on the North American continent) story, and it was a book that I'd highly anticipated. I loved every facet of it — the way society looked, the way characters thought and acted, and how it felt plausibly realistic in terms of the different trajectory the history of their world had taken, the ways power, powerlessness, exploitation and inequality looked in this alternative world — and found it engrossing and well thought-through ... until the very final moments. This was when the explanation for the Roman-ness of the world was provided for the characters and the reader, and it was so stupid and unbelievable that the whole impressive edifice of the book came crashing down. Up until that point, I was close to giving Sargassa the highest five-star rating, but that reveal undermined everything that had come before.
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (VE Schwab)
This book is a vampire story from the points of view of three women-turned-vampires at different, though interweaving points in time. As with many vampire stories, it's a love story, a story of vampirisim as a metaphor for queerness (and in this case freedom from societal misogyny as well), and a horror story. I liked it well enough, but I felt that apart from the fact that all the point-of-view characters were women and lesbians, it really didn't do anything that Anne Rice hadn't done already, and done better.
Court of Wanderers (Rin Chupeco)
This book concludes Chupeco's vampire fantasy/romance duology which began with Silver Over Nightfall. I enjoyed the first book a lot — it was very silly and self-indulgent in a way that lined up well with my tastes — but the second was quite underwhelming, and I can't really recommend it.
The Incandescant (Emily Tesh)
I feel certain that Tesh can't have been the first person to write a magical school novel from the perspective of the teachers, and yet much of the commentary around this book seems to focus on this fact. In any case, this element — the elite British boarding school in which magic is just a subject taught alongside more pedestrian subjects, the mundanity of lesson planning and risk assessments (when the day's lesson involves summoning demons), the perspective of a jaded thirtysomething teacher on her charges' teenage reletionship melodrama, staff room politics, A Levels and university applications — is done incredibly well, with the knowledgeable affection of an author clearly highly familiar with UK secondary school teaching in the private sector. I loved this aspect of the book, and wished that it could have remained as low-stakes and episodic as this for its entirety, whereas unfortunately Tesh felt the urge to up the stakes about three-quarters of the way through and abruptly change course into what felt like a wholly different novel, with a villain who was at once as obvious as a flashing light, and with motives that were never made clear.
Six Wild Crowns (Holly Race)
This is a fantasy retelling of the story of Henry VIII and his six wives, in a setting in which the kingdom's magic requires its king to be polygamous and married to six queens at once, each in her own designated castle. The novel's Anne Boleyn equivalent grows suspicious of this set up, and, with some effort manages to join forces with some of her fellow queens to uncover the truth. The reveal will be nothing suprising if you are well read in certain types of female character-centric fantasy novels that were my bread and butter growing up (I won't spoil it here but am happy to do so in the comments), but I liked the directions in which Race took the familiar Tudor characters and found the book an enjoyable ride as a whole.
The Rose Apple Tree Mystery (Ovidia Yu)
This is the latest in Yu's series of historical mysteries set in Singapore during British colonisation, then Japanese occupation, and then the return of British rule. This ninth book takes place in a mountain resort, where her delightfully pragmatic protagonist, Su-Lin, and her British police chief colleague-turned-husband have been sent, ostensibly for their honeymoon but in reality to look into some suspicious deaths. Bad weather traps them with a collection of disreputible people, all (of course) with something to hide, as more murders and disappearances take place, and Su-Lin must solve a locked room mystery. I love this series — it's written with warmth and wry affection, and the setting and characters are always a lot of fun.
Fledgling (Octavia Butler)
This vampire novel (seems to have been something of a theme for me this summer) is Butler's last, and grapples with a lot of her pet themes: the fine line between symbiosis and exploitation, relationships with extreme power imbalances, anti-black racism in the United States and how it might find expression even in fantastical or supernatural settings, and unconventional familial and societal organisation and ways of living. This is now the sixth book by Butler that I've read this year, and I have to conclude at this point that her ideas are really interesting (and her commitment to taking them to their ugliest, but most logical extreme is amazing), and her writing itself (in the sense of the words on the page) I find very pedestrian and lifeless. We learn characters' feelings and motivations in bursts of infodumping, and otherwise the books read almost like news aggregators' journalism: this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. This, far more than the visceral strangeness of Butler's scenarios, served to keep me at an extreme emotional distance from the characters and the fictional events unfolding in every book, and Fledgling was no different.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 11:16 am (UTC)Oooh, this sounds interesting, thank you for sharing! ^_^
no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 11:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 11:30 am (UTC)and started reading The Frangipani Tree Mystery.
I'd not heard of her books before, so I am grateful for the heads up!
You might be interested in a series of murder mysteries that I read a while ago featuring an elderly man, a doctor, in 1970s communist Laos. I enjoyed them.
The Coroner’s Lunch (Dr. Siri Paiboun #1) by Colin Cotterill
"Dr Siri Paiboun, a long-suffering, 72-year-old doctor who has spent much of his life in the jungle as a reluctant guerrilla has been unhappily appointed the national coroner and stationed at a dangerously understaffed and under-resourced hospital in Vientiane. Dr. Siri has a staff of two in the morgue, an impertinent young nurse and a very helpful young man with a mild case of Down’s Syndrome. He has no laboratory, no chemicals, few instruments, and no credentials or interest in pathology. He is also a critic of the regime he helped put in power and has little hope for Laos."
no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 12:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 05:35 pm (UTC)and I mostly enjoyed it
except for the way it talked about fat women's bodies.
Is this an ongoing problem for the series,
that
fat bodies = ridicule, contempt, scorn, shame, mocking, butt of jokes?
no subject
Date: 2025-08-11 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 12:18 pm (UTC)I hope you like The Raven Scholar.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-11 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-11 04:56 pm (UTC)I will put up with just about anything if the plot or tropes are my heartfelt preferences (see for example some of the books I mentioned here, or in my next post), but if they're not 'my' tropes or 'my' plot, I feel the same as you: emotional resonance, characterisation and worldbuilding are more important.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-11 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 12:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 12:19 pm (UTC)The Raven Scholar spoilers
Date: 2025-08-10 12:26 pm (UTC)Some spoilers related to the ending
While I'm curious about the next books in what I believe is planned as a trilogy, I've been only moderately enthusiastic because of Neema's visions of her future. Especially how Cain isn't there, so I'm bracing for a second book that destroys or renders null all the alliances and friendships created in the first book, which is a common "second book disease" in my world XD Godkiller ended up the same, separating all the strangers that had taken so much time becoming friends over the first book. Anyway, if she's alone for most of it, while I'm still interested in a lot of the plot, it'll have less of the same emotional appeal for me... Likewise for the scene of her probable end of life. I'm more neutral about it because I feel like I already experienced something like that with the Broken Earth trilogy in which we get an end of life vision pretty early, if I recall. If this series is sold as a grimdark series though, I probably need to consider my next steps carefully, haha. (Hopeless/tragic endings can leave me feeling down for days on end.) So curious about the dragon magic though, and many more things about the world!Either way, I'm glad you also enjoyed the book :D I don't remember where I got the rec for it but it was a delightful discovery for me. I'm gonna chew some more on the grimdark description.
Re: The Raven Scholar spoilers
Date: 2025-08-10 12:40 pm (UTC)Like you, I'm cautious about the second book (and in some ways I think it could have been a slightly longer standalone if Hodgson had been quicker at getting to the reveal and then wrapped up various other loose threads), but was extremely impressed by the first and am definitely willing to give the follow up a try.
Re: The Raven Scholar spoilers
Date: 2025-08-10 12:57 pm (UTC)I am warmly recommending the book to everyone who will listen regardless, haha. It does what it does so well.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 01:35 pm (UTC)Spoilers for Sargassa and Six Wild Crowns
Date: 2025-08-10 02:17 pm (UTC)Six Wild Crowns is your typical 'patriarchal world built on a lie, in which the new patriarchal religion literally strips women of their magic in order to fuel male supernatural powers, suppressing all memory of the previous matriarchal religion in which women held the power, and rewriting history to paint the powerful women of the past as evil villains who used their power for ill' fantasy novel. I twigged this from basically the first couple of chapters, and then waited for most of the book to see that my suspicions were confirmed and that I was, indeed, very familiar with this type of story!
Re: Spoilers for Sargassa and Six Wild Crowns
Date: 2025-08-10 02:40 pm (UTC)Re: Spoilers for Sargassa and Six Wild Crowns
Date: 2025-08-12 02:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 06:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-11 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-12 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-15 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-11 04:15 pm (UTC)Oh no! Even just reading this one paragraph about it, I got excited at the beginning and then felt so let down at the end! What a disappointment! Do you think it's still worth reading if you go in knowing that there are holes in the ending or would you skip it altogether? I know sometimes expectations are everything.
[eta] Definitely going to read The Raven Scholar despite my dislike of competition-based fantasy novels.
with a villain who was at once as obvious as a flashing light, and with motives that were never made clear.
Definitely the worst part of that book. Why was he doing this??????????
I really adore Kindred, but I haven't been able to vibe with any of the other Butlers I've tried to read, no matter how hard I try. I've always felt like this is my fault as a reader, so it's nice to hear that someone else thinks her ideas are so interesting but the execution doesn't quite work.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-11 05:03 pm (UTC)Kindred is probably my favourite Butler as well (it's the only one I'd read until this year's binge), and it's the only book of hers from I haven't felt emotionally distanced by the pedestrian writing style. As you say, incredible ideas let down by their execution.
Definitely the worst part of that book. Why was he doing this??????????
The absolute weakest element, and so unnecessary, because, as we discussed in other comments here, there's no need for this high-stakes final bit of plot in the first place.
I'll be interested to hear how you find The Raven Scholar, because the competition component is so central to the story. I don't mind competition-based fantasy novels, but I can't stand stories about secret societies (especially in academic or academic-adjacent settings like museums and archives) and so many recently hyped fantasy series leave me completely cold for this reason.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-11 05:09 pm (UTC)The absolute weakest element, and so unnecessary, because, as we discussed in other comments here, there's no need for this high-stakes final bit of plot in the first place.
Even if she Tesh wanted to introduce a "the demon takes over" plot in the final 3/4, she could have done it for a much more interesting/believable reason!
I can't stand stories about secret societies (especially in academic or academic-adjacent settings like museums and archives) and so many recently hyped fantasy series leave me completely cold for this reason.
Oh fascinating! I don't know that I've read enough of those to have feelings either way, but yeah, that's about how I feel about competition stories. However! If the execution is good enough I will read just about anything.