Pretty good, all the way up to the climax. I didn’t buy the core conceit of the final battle. For those who don’t know, basically the ‘true love’s kiss’ that saves Sophie from dying in the end is between her and Agatha, but Sophie had already spent much of the book treating Agatha like trash and then the final few chapters trying to kill her. There was bone-deep hatred in Sophie’s heart and then suddenly, in the space of one scene, she truly loves Agatha? I just prefer my true love to be preceded by a bare minimum of affection and mutual respect, even if it framed as a sisterly bond. But I did like the rest of the story – especially the way that Chainani explored how tropes of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ rob the concepts of their truth.

This is a book set in a utopian town in America where ‘angels’ defeated ‘monsters’ (I think angels are social workers and monsters are criminals and corrupt officials), and the protagonist accidentally summons a real, biblical angel to defeat one of the monsters still roaming around the town. The story deals with child sexual abuse and how adults try to gaslight kids when they point out when the adults aren’t protecting people like they said they would. Emezi masterfully tells the story and really drives home how complacency is the worst sin an ‘angel’ can commit when they’re in a position of authority.

The main character tries to kill herself and gets sent to limbo where she lives all the different lives that she would have lived if she’d made different choices. Along the way, she learns to love the life that she had and returns to her body in time to go to the hospital and get her stomach pumped. Haig is kind of known for his self-help books so the agenda of this fantasy novel is pretty blatant. There’s some cliche but it didn’t kill the experience for me and the premise is still interesting on its own.

A very self-aware book set in TropeTown, where a Manic Pixie Dream Boy is sentenced to group therapy for going off-script. I really liked this book because it’s just a lot of fun! It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but in the end Appelhans does make some very good points about people who dismiss tropes off-hand without really engaging with them, and how far the concept of the Manic Pixie trope has come since its inception.

This is another one that was so much fun to read. The premise is basically: booksellers fight monsters. The Everygirl female lead gets thrown into fantasy mayhem because her dad is a mountain. Very old-school mythology vibes mixed with early 1980s London. Nix also handled the gender fluid romantic interest very well – that is, he made it clear that it’s not a big deal and no one really cares that much about Merlin’s gender presentation. They’re more concerned about whether he’s left-handed or right-handed!

The story of a woman who made a Faustian bargain to live forever, with the catch being that no one would ever remember her. I’ll be honest – I liked the flashback scenes better than the contemporary ones. I found Addie’s relationship with Luc the demon more interesting than her relationship with Henry the human. That’s a personal taste thing, though, and I really enjoyed Addie’s ingenuity in creating a life for herself in spite of Luc’s bullshit curse.

I loved this book because of the line: “It should never have come down to me. It was miserably unfair that it had come to me and Spindle. There were grown-ups who should have stopped it” – the fourteen year-old protagonist saying what we’re all thinking whenever we re-read Harry Potter and realise that Dumbledore was basically recruiting a child soldier instead of fighting his own damn war. Also the idea that a wizard’s magic is tool-specific is charming and I enjoyed how clever the protagonist was in learning how to use bread to defeat armies.

I already wrote a review of this. It’s a feminist translation of Beowulf and I enjoyed it though I did think that Headley should have leaned harder into the modernisms instead of straddling the line between modern and archaic.

This is a book I picked up when I was diagnosed with a chronic illness. I felt like I was being dealt a bad hand and wanted to see how other people had played theirs. The main takeaway from this book is simple, but really hard to swallow: you’re not special. Illness happens to everyone. No one ever promised you a healthy body. You can either incorporate the fact of illness into your self-understanding, and work around it, or you can make yourself more miserable by telling yourself that you’re a victim. Bernhard is much nicer about it than I’m being now. I really needed this book when I read it, and I think I’m going to keep coming back to it as I continue to learn what my new body needs from me.

This was a helpful book because it acknowledged a lot of the feelings I had following the pandemic and contextualised them. The ‘lessons’ are really mindsets that people should consider moving forward; things like listening to experts and not relying on the economy when the humans who hold it up are not safe and healthy. It was American in scope, mostly, though there is some recognition of globalisation – and the fact is, America was such a big player during the pandemic (especially because their economy is so critical to the economies of other countries) that I’m willing to let that slide. It was a very useful book that clarified a lot of things that I’d thought in passing during the pandemic, and provided some useful ways to think going forward.