Review: THE LAST BOYFRIENDS RULES FOR REVENGE by Matthew Hubbard

Apr 032024
 

The Bulletin: Inspired by a viewing of the 1996 film The First Wives Club, Ezra and his two best friends decide to get revenge on their terrible ex-boyfriends. Among the ensuing hijinks, Ezra anonymously uploads a TikTok video setting fire to his closeted ex’s letterman jacket, which quickly goes viral at their school. Further videos of school administrators enforcing their Watch What You Say initiative, which targets queer students and the expression of their identities, also go viral, and the trio begins to realize they can use all this attention to get their voices heard, carve out a place for themselves, and achieve something greater than their own revenge. Ezra narrates this funny, frothy Moxie read-alike, featuring a side cast of Ezra’s unfailingly supportive single dad, a warm, encouraging set of friends, and Ezra’s new hot jock crush (conveniently replacing his former hot jock boyfriend). The revenge antics are entertaining, but like their cinematic inspiration, the boys eventually channel their efforts into standing up for themselves and others, showcasing the power people have when they come together. Some readers should be cautious as Ezra’s disordered eating habits and negative body image are potentially triggering, but the ultimate message, as Ezra’s dad puts it, is that weight “doesn’t change your value.” Ezra bravely faces harassment, oppression from authority figures, and his own insecurities in this inspiring and uplifting story.

Review: THE SIEGE OF BURNING GRASS by Premee Mohamed

Mar 292024
 

Esquire: The latest work from the astonishingly prolific Mohamed (who has three books out this year alone) is a visceral yet intimate story about violence, nationalism, and war. Injured, captured, and tortured by his own side in an endless conflict, the famous pacifist Alefret is sent on a mission to infiltrate an enemy city. With him is Qhudur, a fanatic who will do anything for victory. Mohamed’s bio-technical setting is vivid and unusual—trained medical wasps, floating cities, and lightspiders dot these pages—but the heart of her story is Alefret’s moral struggle. Would killing Qhudur, an act of violence, lead to peace? When does violence become a habit that a country cannot break? How can a person hold tight to their ideals even amid suffering? How can stories and myths help sustain us? But The Siege of Burning Grass isn’t just a thoughtful consideration of war and pacifism; it’s also a feat of worldbuilding, moral complexity, and taut, precisely paced storytelling. After this, I’m ready to hunt down everything else Mohamed has ever written.

Review: THREE KINDS OF LUCKY by Kim Harrison

Mar 282024
 

Mystery and Suspense Magazine: Kim Harrison is best known as one of the mainstays of the modern urban fantasy scene. Three Kinds of Lucky is only going to cement that reputation further, as she gets this new series started with a bang!

There’s no shortage of books in the urban fantasy genre, and it’s such a delight to come across really original worlds, especially when they’re accompanied by a nice twisty plot and characters you really want to spend time with. There’s no shortage of surprises, which kept me glued to the page and reading much too late into the night as I waited to find out what would happen next.

Though it’s the first in the series, Three Kinds of Lucky wraps up nicely – while still leaving plenty of ground to cover with the next few books in the series. I appreciate a book that works as a read on its own, while getting me ready to see where the author takes the world next – and I’ll be there when Kim Harrison is ready to show us what that might entail.

Starred Review: SHEINE LENDE by Darcie Little Badger

Mar 272024
 

Booklist: Little Badger returns to the world of her revelatory, award-winning debut, Elatsoe (2020). Seventeen-year-old Lipan Apache Shane and her mother, Lorenza, set out on a search-and-rescue mission to find two young siblings missing in Texas hill country. In this alternate 1970s America, fairy rings are transport centers. The missing seem to have stumbled on a group of dangerously unpredictable (and potentially world-destroying) mimic rings. They could be anywhere—and anytime. After Lorenza vanishes too, Shane undertakes her first solo rescue with the help of her ghost dog, Nellie. (Like all of the women in her family, going back to her four-greats-grandmother, Elatsoe, Shane is a ghostraiser, able to summon insects, birds, and animals to her aid.) The search takes them to a deserted lakeside town hiding a monster, to the site of a notorious Colorado mimic ring disaster, and, ultimately, Below—to the underworld. Shane’s progress is interspersed with family history, stories, and flashbacks to the traumatic loss of their home eight years earlier. A slower pace allows readers to absorb each inventive twist, unexpected encounter, jolt of creepy menace, and dreamy illustration. It also gives them a chance to know the family and friends, old and new, past and present, who witness and support Shane’s growing determination to not only survive and return home but also thrive and find justice.

Review: HEIRESS TAKES ALL by Emily Wibberley & Austin Siegemund-Broka

Mar 252024
 

Kirkus: A Rhode Island teen who went from riches to rags when her parents divorced masterminds a scheme to get even with her father.

After her mom leaves her philandering dad, 17-year-old Olivia Owens and her principled, loving mother are left broke. Swimming in medical debt after her exhausted mom falls asleep at the wheel in between jobs and is injured in a car crash, Olivia assembles a madcap cast of peers, plus a former teacher, each of whose skills are required for her plan to steal the codes for her dad’s offshore accounts. She intends to execute the heist during her father’s lavish wedding to his third wife, who’s only 25. Tom Pham, Deonte Jones, Cassidy Cross, and Mr. McCoy each have their own basically noble reasons for needing their cut of the money, though Jackson Roese, Olivia’s recent ex, still tries to convince her to abandon her potentially dangerous plan when he shows up at the wedding in a bid to win her back. Twists, obstacles, and double-crossing abound in this totally fun, over-the-top novel featuring smart, witty characters whose first impressions belie their more complex selves. Olivia’s frenetic inner thoughts as she navigates each successive snag balance her ongoing hurt feelings from being abandoned by her dad. Most central characters read white; Tom’s surname cues Vietnamese heritage, and Deonte is Black.

Goofy, poignant, and wildly entertaining.

Review: THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST by Premee Mohamed

Mar 212024
 

Washington Post: Fairies have starred in some terrific books of late, but in Mohamed’s novella they pack a lot more menace. In “The Butcher of the Forest,” the children of a despot known only as the Tyrant wander into an enchanted forest from which nobody has ever emerged, except a woman named Veris. Naturally, the Tyrant forces Veris to go rescue his kids, using her nimbleness to evade the snares and dangers in the woods, while grappling with the ethics of saving the children of a monster. Mohamed excels at telling the stories of ordinary people trapped by dark forces, and she infuses these characters with astounding tenderness and compassion. “The Butcher of the Forest” shows exactly why Mohamed is one of fantasy’s rising stars.

Review: EXORDIA by Seth Dickinson in the New York Times

Mar 152024
 

New York Times: EXORDIA (Tordotcom, 532 pp., $29.99) is Seth Dickinson’s fourth novel and first work of science fiction, following three installments of the excellent Baru Cormorant fantasy series, and it revisits many of those novels’ themes and structures: empire, war and sacrifice.

Set in 2013, “Exordia” is a first-contact story: Anna, a Kurdish survivor of genocide who is fostered in the United States, meets a many-headed snake alien named Ssrin in Central Park. Anna and Ssrin become friends and roommates; Ssrin explains that she comes from a galaxy-conquering empire called the Exordia, and needs Anna’s help to rebel against it.

Anna, Dickinson writes, “is all in, the way only a woman chased out of her home by sarin gas can be all in. Her adult life began at age 7, with an act of alien intrusion, with the roar of Saddam’s helicopters. This is nothing new to her. She’s ready to risk it all, because no part of her life since that first alien invasion has felt real.”

There is a version of this book that might be more palatable to a broad readership: a version in which a traumatized war orphan’s friendship with a warmongering alien heals and redeems them both. This is very decisively not that book. It deliberately withholds what its first three chapters (and dust jacket) seem to promise: a “narratively complete” story centering Anna and Ssrin. Instead, “Exordia” compounds, enlarges and repeats their wounds — the ones inflicted on them, and the ones they inflict on the world and each other — as Dickinson uses a host of other characters to scrutinize ethics, fractal mathematics, theoretical physics and the military-industrial complexes of several nations. The result is agonizing and mesmerizing, a devastating and extraordinary achievement, as well as dizzyingly unsatisfying, given where it ends.

The publisher of “Exordia” claims it is a stand-alone novel. This is baffling. If you stop a play after its first act, it does not become a one-act play. “Exordia” is structured and paced like Book 1 of a series; Dickinson has stated in interviews that a sequel is “absolutely” intended. The word “Exordia” itself — the plural of “exordium” — suggests beginnings and introductions, a throat-clearing before the main work, and I sincerely hope Dickinson gets the opportunity to continue it.

Review: THE LAST BOYFRIENDS RULE FOR REVENGE by Matthew Hubbard

Mar 132024
 

Booklist: Ezra feels like a third wheel. His two best friends, Lucas and Finley, have boyfriends, while Ezra is single. Or is he? Well, no, he does have a boyfriend, golden boy Presley, but it’s a secret since Presley is deeply closeted. The status quo is shattered when Lucas’ and Finley’s boyfriends dump them, and Presley turns out to be a player, using Ezra to make his intended jealous. It’s Ezra who suggests exacting revenge. He begins secretly posting anonymous videos of their machinations to TikTok, where they go viral, attracting millions of views as the boys fight their school’s homophobic Watch What You Say policy. Will they succeed and will Ezra find true love? Stay tuned. Hubbard’s first novel is an agreeable success, though it sometimes requires a willing suspension of disbelief. But it is well plotted, even inspirational in the boys’ idealized fight for visibility. The characters are empathic, including Ezra’s father, who is a supportive sweetheart who wisely declares, “Believing in yourself is the best revenge.”

Review: THREE KINDS OF LUCKY by Kim Harrison

Mar 082024
 

Bookpage: Kim Harrison’s THREE KINDS OF LUCKY is an immediately compelling urban fantasy with an intricate magic system and complex world. In THREE KINDS OF LUCKY by Kim Harrison, author of the bestselling Hollows series, magic has its own specialized sanitation service: Sweepers, who pick up a byproduct of magic called dross. If left unattended, dross can attract shadow, a dangerous, somewhat intelligent life-form that can easily kill mages, sweepers and normal humans alike. THREE KINDS OF LUCKY will immediately pull readers in with its fast pace and efficient storytelling; the entirety of its nearly city-shattering events all happen within a few days…  the mechanically intricate magic system and complex world Harrison has created makes this series opener well worth the read.

Review: THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST by Premee Mohamed

Mar 072024
 

New York Times: Premee Mohamed’s THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST is a genre-blending adventure full of bizarre creatures and dark magic. At the center of this novel is a forbidden forest that sits at the northern edge of a nameless town. No one who sets foot in the wood returns, with the exception of Veris Thorn, who once entered, somehow survived and came back. Now, the ruthless foreign tyrant who rules the region has pulled Veris from her home and given her a task: Go back into the forest and retrieve his children who are ensnared there. The tyrant gives Veris only one day to recover them, and if she fails, he will kill her family.

Fast-paced, tense, fantastical and uncanny, “The Butcher of the Forest” is a perfect mix of horror and fantasy. The perilous dimension hidden inside the forest is full of wicked shape-shifting beings, undead deer and other monstrosities, but it’s Mohamed’s beautiful prose and endearing characters that make this a powerful story.

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