May Books

I read 8 books in May and mostly they were really good books. I’ve also started using this new app called Bookly to track my reading progress and I think it’s my favourite app ever. I love statistics.

I spent 60 hours reading in May so my goal for next month is 65 hours. I’ve set my goal for the year at 600 hours.

 

River of Pain (Canonical Alien Trilogy #3) by Christopher Golden

2 stars

Genres: Horror, Aliens, Science Fiction

Queer Rep: None

There’s not much point to this book. It’s set in the Alien universe between the first movie and the second. It shows what happens to the colonists and specifically Newt’s family.

The story starts out interesting because the colonists are exploring the planet and you know something awful is going to happen so there’s this great tension. It had me hooked right through the first attack and trying to figure out what was going on. Then I lost interest. I knew what was going to happen and there were no interesting characters to keep my attention.

Unfortunately the children are really annoying, and that includes Newt, and I could have done with a whole lot less of them. I wasn’t interested in their sections at all. Children are really hard to write well and I think listening to this as an audiobook with the narrators trying to do kid voices made it worse.

I don’t think they should have bothered with including Ripley either. She’s one of my favourite characters but there was nothing for her to do other than decide to go the planet and we’ve already seen that in the movie. Every time she popped up it felt like they were copying scenes from the movie. There was no point.

Go read Alien: Out of the shadows instead, they may have also limited themselves by making it canon compliant but at least it feels new rather than a rehash.

 

Diving into the wreck (Diving Universe #1) by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

3 stars

Genres: Science Fiction, Space Exploration

Queer Rep: F/F Romance

I love the idea of this series. Space exploration is really interesting to me. So a universe where spaceships that have been abandoned and missing for decades or centuries until a diver comes along to explore it is exactly what I want to read.

I think this is partly what the Alien universe should be about. They should stop focusing on the first two movies and what’s ‘canon’. Create new characters that are exploring the universe and have them come across the Xenomorphs without knowing what they’re getting into. That’s what I like about Diving into the wreck. Boss is a diver who’s fascinated by history and she finds an ancient ship in a part of space that it shouldn’t be possible to find it. So she’s got some idea of what the ship is but she can’t see inside and doesn’t know how it got to be where it is.

Not only is the mystery really interesting but so is how Boss goes about diving wrecks. She has rules she sticks to because she’s seen how it can go wrong when people don’t. It’s fascinating reading about the process but doesn’t go into so much detail that it becomes a slog, like reading Artemis did.

This is short because it seems to be two novellas that have been linked together but it’s the first in a series called the Diving universe so there’s lots more to read.

There’s also a lesbian couple in Boss’s crew so yay queer people exist in this universe and they act like people and not human tropes.

The next book is The City of Ruins and I’ll be reading it in July because my June TBR is big enough as it is.

 

Havemercy (Havemercy #1) by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett

5 stars

Genres: High Fantasy, M/M Romance, Dragons, Steampunk

Queer Rep: M/M Romance

I’ve written a whole review on this book and I’ll post that soon. So I’ll just stick to the main points.

There are four main characters Royston, Hal, Rook and Thom. They each have their own first person viewpoint, which is unusual. Usually when writing in first person authors tend to stick to having one viewpoint character because it can be hard to switch between them without confusing the reader. But maybe that’s one of those taken for granted pieces of writing advice that’s not as important as people make it out to be. Because the authors pull it off great here.

There are two plotlines running throughout the book, that of Royston and Hal, and Rook and Thom. The blurb is a bit misleading because the storylines don’t really merge until right at the very end and all four of them are never together.

There’s also no quest in the traditional fantasy (lord of the rings type) sense.

The war doesn’t even affect the characters until further into the book. Before that all the conflict is character driven and I love it.

Royston and Hal have to hide their romance while they live in the countryside with Royston’s brother. He’s been exiled there for sleeping with a prince of a country that’s very homophobic. If he hadn’t been such a powerful magician he’d probably been punished more.

While Rook is an airman with the dragon corps and so gets away with a whole lot of things he shouldn’t because the dragon corps are the only reason they haven’t been invaded. Which means poor Hal gets assigned to teach sensitivity training to the airmen so they’ll have less diplomatic incidents.

I was really invested in all the characters and I couldn’t put it down.  I can’t wait to reread this after I finish the series. That being said I don’t recommend this if you like lots of action and you want to read about lots of dragon battles. I can understand how people would be disappointed after reading the description of the book. The dragon Havemercy is barely in the book despite being the title and on the cover.

The next book is demon shadow and is all about figuring how to move on after the war.

 

City of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy) by S.A. Chakraborty

4.5 stars

Genres: Historical Fantasy, Middle-East, Muslim Fantasy

Queer Rep: Queerbaiting, Bisexual character not revealed as bisexual until the epilogue.

This is fantasy set in the Middle East with Djinn, flying carpets and rivers turning into giant snakes. I find it fascinating because I know next to nothing about Islamic folklore or culture. The most I know is from Aladdin and that’s very Disney.

Nahri is a thief and conman living in Cairo trying to survive. She accidentally summons a daeva called Dara and suddenly she’s on the run from the Ifrit and trying to make it to the city of Daevabad where she’s told she’ll be safe.

While in Daevabad Prince Alizayd is trying to help people and just making everything worse. I can’t stand him and when he’s with Dara I can’t decide who I’m rooting for to win because they are pretty much as intolerable as each other.

Although I think I enjoyed Dara more because Nahri doesn’t put up with much from him.

The politics of the city are really complicated with so many different tribes and alliances that it gets a bit muddled and I’m going to have to read this book again to get all the little details.

The daeva are hated by the Djinn while the Daeva hate the shafit who are part Djinn part human and treated as second class citizens. The current ruling family took over the city because the Nahid’s were slaughtering the shafit.

Nahri is not only a shafit but also a Nahid so she could have a claim to the throne. She’s also inherited the  healing powers that only Nahid’s have and so is very valuable.

I won’t explain anymore because I’ve probably made a mess of explaining that.

There’s also some queerbaiting that goes on with the older prince probably being bisexual but it’s not till the end of the book that that’s confirmed. And when I say end I mean the epilogue. So there better be some queer romances going on in book 2.

The sequel Kingdom of Copper comes out in November and I can’t wait. It’s on my top 12 most anticipated reads of 2018.

 

Ruins of Karzelek (The Mandrake Company #4) by Ruby Lionsdrake

1 star, DNF

Genres: Science Fiction Romance

Queer Rep: None that I noticed

I was so excited for this book because it’s all about exploring ancient ruins on alien planets. I thought it would be like Diving into the Wreck unfortunately it was so tedious I couldn’t be bothered to get half way.

The mystery of the alien ruins was intriguing and I was looking forward to all the history and world building. But to get to that you have to get through so much stuff I just don’t care about. I don’t see why the author felt the need to put a mine on the planet to get in the way of getting to the ruins. Maybe if the characters had been likable I’d have been able to stand it but I just didn’t care. They’re boring.

It started off promising with a woman, her mother and her sister being blackmailed into going to the ruins because someone has kidnapped their dad. But then the mother and sister disappear out of the story and mercenaries are hired to help get to the ruins. They aren’t interesting at all. Most of them are sexist and the guy who’s meant to be nice is just creepy in how he pursues the main character.

I got to the part where alien creatures attack their camp and realised I didn’t care if any of them died. I could have skimmed through up until they get to the ruins, because I do skip parts that are boring, but if I don’t like the characters then why should I care about the mystery.

I think the tipping point was when I realised  the main character was starting to like the creepy man and I was not going to put up with that romance. Straight romances are mostly boring.

It’s partly my own fault though because I only read the description and didn’t look to see where people had shelved it. I might have still attempted it if I knew it was romance but I would have been more prepared and less disappointed when that took precedence over the alien ruins.

So I put the book down and moved on to the next book in my tbr.

 

On the edge of gone by Corinne Duyvis

5 Stars

Genres: Science Fiction, Autistic, Queer

Queer Rep: Trans Woman, F/F Romance

A comet is about to hit earth and kill most people and make it very hard to survive for a long time. So all the useful and rich people get evacuated on generation ships or get to live in permanent bunkers that will keep them alive.

Denise is an autistic biracial girl who has an unreliable drug addicted mother and a sister who’s gone missing. Her mother makes them late for their shelter and they stop to help a lesbian couple who are meant to be on a generation ship. So they get to stay on the ship until it’s safe enough for them to go outside again.

Denise decides she’s going to get them to let her family stay but she’s also got to find her sister who never showed up.

This is own voices autistic representation and it shows. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with an autistic character where I’ve thought ‘yep, that describes my experience’.

I love the themes of this book too. Who does get to chose who’s worthy to be saved? Denise has to prove she’s useful to get on the ship. Even though they have some space and it seems like saving some of their passengers and showing compassion should be enough of a reason to save them.

I love this book and I’m going to write a full review at some point because I have so many things to say, I don’t want to ramble here.

I can’t wait to read more by this author.

 

The Midnight Sea (The Fourth Element #1) by Kat Ross

4 stars

Genres: Fantasy, Romance

Queer Rep: M/M Romance, Queer Themes

This book is a bit fascinating to me because it has some very clear queer themes, like self hatred when you live in a world that has taught you to hate yourself.

Usually authors seem to think they’re being inclusive enough by just including queer themes but this author decided to also use queer characters as well.

And being gay isn’t an awful thing in this world. The leader of the water dogs doesn’t hate himself for loving another man, he hates himself for loving a daeva who he has been taught are evil.

Then you’ve got Darius. He’s a daeva and has been enslaved all his life. He was taught from birth that his true nature is evil and he needs to be controlled. So he not only accepts his enslavement but he thinks it’s right and that all daeva should be enslaved. This is what their religion teaches them. This is done so much better here than how Six of Crows did the Nina and Matthias relationship.

Nazafareen is the water dog who controls Darius and she’s uneasy with it all the way through the book. She sees that the way things are wrong way before Darius does. It can be harder to accept the truth because to survive in a world that hates him he’s had to really internalise it and become very religious.

I love books that explore how systems of oppression are created and maintained. Usually by distorting the truth or getting a population to believe lies.

The ending went on a bit and I think it should have stopped way before that point. I was already hooked and going to read the sequel.

All I can say there better be queer characters in the sequel.

 

Next month is pride month and I’m going to be reading exclusively queer science fiction and fantasy books. I’ve posted my June TBR and you can read about it here.

I’ve also decided to have autistic science and fiction and fantasy as a theme for an upcoming month. Hopefully there will be some more own voices I can find.