Welcome to the hazy days of summer with our August reviews! This month, we have a young person fighting monsters while figuring out who she is, a trans lesbian meeting her werewolf mate, and a young woman born into slavery on a starship.
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Happy Reading!
Title/Author: Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen
Reviewer: Jordan
Summary: Nettie Lonesome dreams of a greater life than toiling as a slave in the sandy desert. But when a stranger attacks her, Nettie wins more than the fight. Now she's got friends, a good horse, and a better gun! But if she can't kill the thing haunting her nightmares and stealing children across the prairie, she'll lose it all—and never find out what happened to her real family.
Series/Standalone: The Shadow - Book 1
Genre/Sub-Genre: Fantasy
Book Format: eAudiobook
Length: 10 hours 48 minutes
LGBTQ+ Orientation: Transgender, Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian
Content Warnings: Gender dysphoria, graphic violence, death, gore, and monsters
Well-Written/Editor Needed: Well-written
Would I Recommend?: Yes!
Personal thoughts: What an explosive ride! The characters and the worldbuilding are rich with imagination while the plot is rich with action scenes and memorable moments of introspection and connection. The end is also something to behold, a scene that makes me anxious for the next book in this complete four-book series.
Throughout the book, Nettie, known also by several male names, struggles to figure out who she is and where her attractions lay. Because she leads a sheltered life up until the point where she gains her Sight, this makes perfect sense. Even at the end, she’s still not quite sure and I appreciate that her questions don’t get completely answered, making for a realistic experience.
This was recommended to me by another librarian, and it did not disappoint. I highly recommend it as well!
Title/Author: That Night I Got Dragged Home by A Werewolf by Autumn Wolff
Reviewer: Puck M.
Summary: Lilith Chambers is just a trans girl trying to get by in the small Maine town of Pine Springs, living with a crappy roommate and working as a rural librarian. But when a beautiful butch named Mars Dubois rescues her from some unwanted advances during the Annual Wylde Night Festival, she is plunged into a world she had no idea existed. They spend the night together and Lilith discovers that (1) Mars is a werewolf, (2) they are fated mates, and (3) being a werewolf’s mate has opened the doors to an entirely magical world. Lilith begins down the road of being a sorceress, guided by the ghost of a trans witch from the days of Pine Springs’ founding. She learns about the curse a wraith laid on Mars’ pack, but breaking that curse and taking down the wraith may be beyond even the powers she and Mars can bring to bear.
Series/Standalone: First book in a duology
Genre/Sub-Genre: Paranormal Romance
Book Format: Paperback
Length: 312 pages
LGBTQ+ Orientation: Lesbian
HEA/HFN: No
Content Warnings: Gender dysphoria, societal transantagonism, graphic violence, blood, some body horror
Ratio of Sex/Plot: About 1/3 is sex scenes
Well-Written/Editor Needed: Well-written but copyeditor needed
Would I Recommend it?: Yes!
Personal Thoughts: This was a really fun romance with some really cool fantasy worldbuilding—about werewolves, merpeople, vampires, wraiths, and magic/sorcery. The main character, being a trans lesbian rural librarian, has a constellation of identities that I don’t often see in paranormal/fantasy romance protagonists. Fellow librarians reading this blog will be pleased to hear that the description of Lilith’s librarianship feels true to the profession, although I’m an urban librarian so I can’t speak to the specific experiences of rural/small-town librarians.
The one warning I will give is that this book ends on a major cliffhanger, which I did know before picking it up since I cataloged it in my job. The author’s note at the end promises an ending to this cliffhanger in 2025 and I can confirm that the sequel, That Night I Got Married to A Werewolf is already out, although I haven’t read it yet.
That said, I feel confident recommending this book because it’s just so dang fun! I’m not generally into the “fated mates” trope played straight (I am acknowledging and ignoring the obvious joke), but Mars and Lilith’s matter-of-fact approach to their newly-mated state and the destiny-mandated-horniness associated with it is genuinely hilarious. The sex scenes between them are fun and sweet, and Mars gives wonderful wish-fulfillment as a cis lesbian who knows just how to have sex with a trans girl and gives her non-judgmental space when the dysphoria rears up.
Lilith’s narrative voice is snarky and meme-filled, so when it drops into a more serious register at intense moments, it lends the moment extra weight.
And have I mentioned how cool the magic worldbuilding is? Because it very much is; I particularly liked the terror and wonder of meeting the Maiden, Mother, and Crone and the Mother’s implication later in the book that they started out as mortal women before becoming gods.
I’d say that the weaker parts of the book are Mars’ POV chapters. They do provide a perspective on what’s happening outside of Lilith’s field of vision, but because there are so few of them (way less than a 50/50 split) it's surprising when they show up and I’m not sure the added perspective is worth how jarring that surprise can be. My other critique is the clear need for a proofreader/copyeditor. There were multiple minor errors that didn’t get in the way of understanding the text but were noticeable and therefore distracting.
Overall, though, a very fun book and I fully intend to read the sequel, and then move on to Wolff’s other works.
Title/Author: An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
Reviewer: Lo
Summary: Born into slavery aboard the generational starship Matilda, Aster Grey struggles to survive in a rigidly stratified society ruled by the elite of the upper decks. But Aster's discovery that something is wrong with the ship sets the stage for dramatic transformation—both personal and political.
Series/Standalone: Standalone
Genre/Sub-Genre: Dystopian Sci-Fi
Book Format: Print
Length: 351 pages
LGBTQ+ Orientation: Mentions of lesbian/sapphic relationships, male/male relationships, intersex people, genderqueer/nonbinary people.
Content Warnings: The f-slur is used quite a few times as well as mentions of graphic and sexual violence.
Well-Written/Editor Needed: It was well-written grammatically and sentence structure-wise. However, there is a lot of plot armor and loose threads that left me feeling rather frustrated by the end.
Would I Recommend?: Meh, it had so much going for it and some really great ideas/threads/plots, but the last quarter of the novel was so frustrating, any enjoyment of the first two-thirds felt like a waste.
Personal thoughts: As mentioned earlier, this book had so much going for it but it got royally messed up and the whole story took a massive nosedive. This book was selected for my book discussion group so I had the opportunity to hear other readers' opinions and a general consensus;—that being it had promise in the beginning, got distracted and muddled in the middle, and then absolutely lost it in the end. We had many questions about the logistics of the ship, the different cultures on the various levels and how they stayed relatively insular for about 300 years that people have been aboard the Matilda. Not to mention that there was no explanation/reasoning to the conclusion. The final arc had Aster and Theo acting entirely out-of-character. Giselle loses her last threads of humanity and along with it any semblance of sympathy the reader could possibly have for her. Specifically, I had issues with how time seems to work as the timeline we are given before the start of the book and the timeline that occurs during the book are vastly at different speeds. Overall, I ended up giving this book 2.5 stars as the discussions around gender identity were put together really well but the ending was so anti-climatic and out-of-character that it cheapened the whole story, especially with the degree in which one must suspend their disbelief just to get through the last part of the story.
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