#Vlad books reviews

[rosemariecawkwell]

Review: Captain Vlad and the Mary Rose, by Kate and Sam Cunningham

Formats available: PaperbackFirst published: 01/04/24Series: A Flea in HistoryISBN: 9780993338237 Description King Henry VIII’s favourite ship, the Mary Rose, is sailing to Portsmouth to stop a French invasion. This should be the easy part of the journey, but for Captain Vlad flea and his crew of rats, the humans and their pets create dangers on every deck. Join Vlad and Roxton rat as they…

[scorbleeo]

Book Review: Isn't it Bromantic?

Bromance Book Club (Book 4) by Lyssa Kay Adamas

Source: Google Images

With his passion for romance novels, it was only a matter of time before Vlad took up the pen to write a novel the Bromance Book Club would swoon over.

Elena Konnikova has lived her entire adult life in the shadows. As the daughter of a Russian journalist who mysteriously disappeared after speaking out against government corruption, she escaped danger the only way she knew how. She agreed to marry her childhood friend, Vladimir, and move to the United States, where he is a professional hockey player in Nashville.

Vlad, aka The Russian, thought he could be content with his marriage of convenience. But after four years, it's become too difficult to continue in a one-sided relationship. He joined the Bromance Book Club to learn how to make his wife love him, but all he's learned is that he deserves more. He's ready to create his own sweeping romance--both on and off the page.

The Bros are unwilling to let Vlad forgo true love--and this time they're not operating solo. They join forces with Vlad's senior citizen neighbors, a group of meddling widows who call themselves The Loners. Just when things finally look promising, the danger from Elena's past life intrudes, and the book club will face their first-ever life-or-death grand gesture as they race to a happy ever after.

ISBN: 9780593332771 (2021) | Source: Goodreads

Wondering if This Series was Even Worth My Time

My enjoyment for the Bromance Book Club series is slowly diminishing as I get through each book... Honestly speaking, I don't know why I am still reading this series because I have so many issues with the way Adams wrote these books.

First of all, this is the fourth book in the series and every single book seems to follow the same template. I have no problem with the template but if an author is going to write a series of books and to read the subsequent books, you kind of need to read them chronologically, the author should not be using the same template in every single book. Do people actually like how repetitive the books are?

Secondly, Adams has some kind of continuity problem. When it comes to her side characters, you can see their personalities but when some of these side characters become the main characters, they (mainly the male leads) began to feel like carbon copies of each other. Take Isn't It Bromantic? as an example, Vlad always had a slightly childish side to him in the first couple of books but when it's suddenly him as the main character, it felt like I was reading another "Russian". There's simply nothing worthy of connecting to Adams's characters at all because they constantly feel like different people in different books.

Now focusing more on this book, I have questions. In the beginning of Isn't It Bromantic?, Vlad mentioned that Russians are very emotional people, is that true? You know what, literally everything that Vlad and Elena mentioned about their Russian culture, I wonder if that was accurate... And why is this book so dramatic? It is so redundantly dramatic or at least, that drama came out of nowhere. It isn't even like with the second book where Liz was doing everything to take her ex-boss down, that drama felt natural when it was happening because everything throughout the book made sense and led up to it. Whereas for this book, it felt like Adams just needed another dramatic subplot at the last second and hastily included it in her book.

Can I also please just say, there is no chemistry between Vlad and Elena at all. The second they started making out, I gave up reading it, I was just speeding through it to get the book over and done with. I seriously thought Vlad had way more chemistry with Colton even back in the third book, and I am not referring to the platonic kind.

My last complain, I promise. Lyssa Kay Adams is not a romantic genius. I really dislike how the members of the bookclub always claim that they know romance, I'm sorry but their creator don't know romance. The way they talk about conflicts, grand gestures and whatnot... Oh my gosh, it's Adams crowning herself as a romantic genius and that irks me because her concept of romance is narrow-minded. I actually disagree when the boys were telling Vlad that he needed a conflict in the book he was writing, as if Vlad and Elena's special six-years marriage isn't conflict enough. Remember what I said about Adams writing the books in this series with a template? She further confirmed it for me here.

If you ask me, this series could have ended as a duology. The more Adams write for this series, the more it's feeling like a cash grab. I cannot read the next book now so I will give myself time to breathe. However, when I do decide to pick up book 5 and find out it is not the final book, I will DNF this series without reading the next book.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

[thebibliosphere]

Talking in a group chat with some fellow author friends earlier, and the subject of our book reviews came up. As in, "What's the favorite thing anyone's ever said about your book?" type thing.

I had to pause and think about it because people have said a lot of nice things about my work. That it's the queer goth love child of Jane Austen meets Terry Pratchett, for one. That Nathan's disability arc meant the world to them. That Vlad's blatant neurodivergence made them feel seen. That Ursula's profound loneliness made them feel less alone.

But the one thing I see time and time again that makes me smile is the word "comfort." So that's the one I went with. That people find my work comfortable.

So you can imagine my surprise when someone chimed in going, "Noo, don't say that! Your work is so good!"

I won't lie, it took me a solid ten to twenty seconds to realize that she thought someone describing my work as being "comfortable" was an insult and not one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.

And maybe I'm just several types of mentally ill, chronically ill, and too beaten down by the world, but I do not understand what is wrong with comfort. Comfort, for me, is a physically unobtainable goal. You might as well rank it up there with getting transported into another world and becoming Queen of the Fae. For me, reading comfortable narratives where people get taken care of with compassion and love is a fantasy.

And, like, just objectively speaking, something being comfortable doesn't mean it's not good.

It doesn't mean it's not thought provoking. It doesn't mean conflict-free or lacking moral dilemmas. It means people feel safe reading it, knowing those things will be resolved.

I'm not trying to keep my readers on edge with anxiety, always wondering where the next plot twist will come in. That's not my style of writing. It's not my goal. It's fine if it's yours, but like... Comfort is not an insult, and it makes me a little sad to think some people think it is.

[ew-selfish-art]

DCxDP AU: Danny and Damian are actually twins but were never raised together- Talia would divide her time between bases, spending time with them separately (but spending more time with Damian). Jason technically only met Danny in his time with the LoA.

It still a very tenuous truce that Jason has with his family when he finally joins them for breakfast after a late night of busting a drug ring. And sue him, he's never cared to look at the little one that closely when he's not pointing a knife in his direction. But then the little Bat Brat turned his face towards the ray of light streaming into the family room of the Manor and Jason caught a closer look to the… green color. Huh.

“Hey demon, when you died did you come back with those green eyes?” Jason calls out, and perhaps it’s a little antagonistic but something deeply unsettles the crime lord about this.

“Tt. I’ve always had green eyes Todd. Your observation skills remain dulled-“ Damian begins to berate him but Jason’s scowl deepens and he interrupts.

“No, they were definitely Bruce’s color blue when I met you with Talia- I punched your lights out because of it remember?” Jason supplies, looking perturbed and having a small child look equally perturbed back at him.

“You never met me in Nanda Parbat. And mother would have never allowed you to attack above your station and live.”

“Kid I literally have the scars from my punishment. My memory from that time after the pit might not be great or even good but I know, I know I punched your lights out.”

“No doubt you have been fooled by a clone then-“ Damian says but he looks upset.

“Talia called you Dami then, you’ve never let us call you that.” Jason supplies further, he was certain that Talia had introduced him as her son.

“I was never called such an informal name.” But Damian looks disturbed more than he looks like he wants to fight.

Eventually, after combing through their collective memory of Talia's where abouts and Damian's lack of interaction with Todd, it’s decided that they have to talk to Drake who was there the most recently. Neither wants to add the fact that he's also the most knowledgeable family member when it comes to the LoA now.

“Huh? Yeah, it looks like Talia kept ledgers dividing her time between two places- the journal reads like there is Dami as Damian but… maybe it’s Dami AND Damian…” Tim reviews the books he robbed them of with a fine tooth comb and suddenly this pattern of using the “nickname” and the “full name” start to show a “first child” and a “second child”.

Damian was clearly the favorite. The ‘Dami’ kid was sent away on a suicide mission pretty early in their lives, he would have left right after Todd did at the age of 8-ish. They all groaned at the cold trail following this assignment he failed to return from- it meant that they had to involve Bruce with a DNA search of the local areas the kid had been sent to across the globe. One of which, weirdly enough, was in Illinois.

…

“My name isn’t Daniel” Danny sighs at yet another event the Mansons brought him to with Vlad looking over his shoulder every five minutes.

Then the weird skinny kid who’s the big talk of the town approaches him with some guy built like a tank and says: “It’s Damian, isn’t it?”

Danny literally sinks through the floors, but in his attempts to run out the back door he’s stopped- By a guy that has Danny's own face and a very sharp looking knife pressed to Danny's throat.

In short- Danny introduced himself to the Fentons as “Dami” but they misheard him and called him Danny and fuck it, it’s close enough.

Now it turns out that their mother only planned on one surviving the artificial womb and gave them very different amounts of her time- so she just gave them the same name and reported it like she only had one child.

[hinacu-arts]

Writing idea masterpost - DP x DC

Fav tropes (specifically: DoM tropes)

Danny & Billy dynamic

Doofenshmirtz AU

Ghost King Court AU

Haunted hotspots

Tik tok stitch

Movie night

Dani & Kon platonic soulmatch - timkon

Vlad sues Lex for plagiarism. Danny sues Lex and Superman for custody of Kon

Football tailgate

"Pit incubus"

Asexual repro = Zeus?

Prince Jason 1 / Prince Jason 2

Royalty AU

"Spooky"

Dead On Main

DoM cult ritual

DoM Wedding

DoM sleeping beauty

DoM R.I.P.D. AU

DoM Hades & Persephone

DoM spooky speed dating

DoM sex pollen

DoM college aus

DoM soulmates?!

Royal Arranged Marriage

Serious Chaos

SC Student AU

SC Zookeeper AU

Eleanor

Missile launcher

Irritation-to-lovers

Get out of my city

Royal Match

Prompts

Fenton-Foley Protection Services

Amity is city-state

Wrong number

Batfam ghost cores

Boor

PTA wars

Jason the book review youtuber

Spacedace's QoC au designs

These two aus

[satureja13]

(This is Part 2 of our 🔍 Interactive Clue Hunt 🔎 to guide Rubyn and the Boys through the Jungle of Selvadorada 🗺️ Today we will reveal the solution of the first riddle. If you still want to take part and find the solution yourself, stop reading and -> hop over to Part 1)

Finding out as whom Ji Ho and Jeb performed in april was easy. It was their very first stage performance! None of them will ever forget it.

It was during their first week at their boarding school in the Jailhouse Cafeteria and they perfomed as the Blues Brothers!

Jeb: "Ok this was the easy part. But which of these gem stones is blue?" Time to do a bit of research...

Saiwa: "Oh! It's the Sapphire!" Jack: "So we have to go to the 'Sapphire Retreat' to find the next clue!"

Rubyn: "Ok, get ready Boys. I'll book the 'Sapphire Retreat' online and then we're gonna check it out. Don't forget the bottle and the notes - and the insectizides..."

Luckily 'Sapphire Retreat' was available. Even though the accomodation seems pretty and clean it was a bit hidden on the booking site and didn't have much views (and no reviews...).

And then they called the horses. There's no time to waste. Better not understimate the Bond's evil influence on Vlad...

Lunatic went straight to Tyalindo to greet him <3

And off they went.

Rubyn doesn't have a horse ^^'

From the Beginning  ~  Underwater Love ~  Latest 🌴 'The Expedition' from the beginning ▶️ here 📚 Previous Chapters: 🎤 'Putting the Boys Back together' from the beginning ▶️ here 🥀 'Disbandment of the Group' from the beginning ▶️ here

[ereborne]

1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 15, 17, 20, 26, 32, 44, 46 (weird or genre-defying books), 47, 50

Thank you for so many prompts!! This was so fun to do and now it is so long. I hope it's as good to read as it was to write out!

1) Name the best book you've read so far this year: I answered Aftermarket Afterlife by Seanan McGuire to digs just a moment ago, but I'm glad you asked too, because honorable mention goes to Inheritance by Nora Roberts. It came out in November, not technically 2024, but time is fake and 2024 is just beginning anyway, so I'm counting it. Inheritance starts pretty slow and for a bit I was wondering how it was going to manage a satisfying resolution, and then I realized she was doing something new! (unfair. she's been building to this since 2015, it's just that now is when it's starting to really click with me) Instead of a trilogy with three couples whose romance arcs each get centered in their own book, this is going to be a trilogy focusing on unraveling the family curse/haunting, with the four main characters growing tighter as a unit (and forming their two romantic pairs, of course) throughout. I really like the characters and I am delighted by the curse/haunt storytelling. Cannot wait to see more.

2) Favorite fantasy book(s): this is so hard. okay, okay, brief rundown. brief. I can do this. bookshelf by bookshelf, I think. we'll take as granted everything by Seanan McGuire, sure. Bayou Moon and Magic Strikes by Ilona Andrews. By the Sword and From a High Tower by Mercedes Lackey. Bryony and Roses and Summer in Orcus by T Kingfisher. The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley. Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane. The Long Patrol-Marlfox-Taggerung by Brian Jacques, which I always read in a shot as if they were one book. Similarly, the Protector of the Small and Magic Circle quartets by Tamora Pierce, and the Icewind Dale trilogy by RA Salvatore. Tangled Webs by Elaine Cunningham. The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien (really all the LotR trilogy, but even I cannot say I sit and read them all three straight through as if they were one). The Wee Free Men and Thud! by Terry Pratchett.

4) Favorite science fiction book(s): The Ship Who Sang and Dragonsdawn by Anne McCaffrey. Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie. Exit Strategy and Network Effect by Martha Wells. The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers. Rescues and the Rhyssa by TS Porter (also a favored queer fiction book, but I love the alien worldbuilding so much it has to be here)

8) Favorite queer fiction book(s): Humanity for Beginners by Faith Mudge. Nightvine by Felicia Davin. the Harwood Spellbook series by Stephanie Burgis (also a down-in-one-shot series). Holly and Oak by R Cooper.

12) Favorite horror book(s): I haven't read too many horror books, so my pool is limited here, but The Twisted Ones and The Hollow Places by T Kingfisher both gave me the shudders so bad.

15) Which genre(s) are your favorite? Fantasy! I love all the fantasy subgenres, and especially the magical realism overlaps.

17) Favorite finished book series: How finished is finished? A lot of my serieses are made up of several trilogy/quartet subsets together in a world. hmmmm. The Protector of the Small quartet again by Tamora Pierce, I think.

20) Where and how do you find new books to read? I mentioned in my reply to digs that I'm subscribed to a ton of newsletters, but I feel like I undersold their effect on me. I don't know how many I'm subscribed to--just sat here and off the top of my head counted to eighteen that post at least weekly and I'm so sure I'm missing some--and I love having that regular infusion of book progress and reviews and writing thoughts and commentary. I really do recommend that folks subscribe to their favorite authors.

26) Favorite novella(s): Silver Shark by Ilona Andrews. The Seven Brides-to-Be of Generalissimo Vlad by Victoria Goddard. Jackalope Wives by T Kingfisher.

32) Name your favorite author(s): massive overlap with everybody else I've listed here. who haven't I mentioned? Jennie Crusie, Jayne Ann Krentz, JD Robb (which is a Nora Roberts penname but they've got distinct enough works I want to list them out separate). Patricia Briggs, Patricia C Wrede, Max Gladstone, Gail Carriger, Nalini Singh. And Ed Greenwood, about half the time.

44) The book(s) whose stories have become part of your very makeup: The Lord of the Rings trilogy by JRR Tolkien. Watership Down by Richard Adams. Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie. Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs. The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. Phoenix & Ashes by Mercedes Lackey. The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard.

46) I like (weird or genre-defying books), recommend me a book to read, please: First thought was the Humans Are Weird series by Betty Adams, though that might not be what you mean. They're intensely fun collections of 'humans are space-orcs' style vignettes. Maybe more directly books that are weird would be the Craft Sequence series by Max Gladstone and Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw. Very toothy complicated magical realism. And my favorite genre-blending books are always the Elemental Masters books by Mercedes Lackey. A Study in Sable for instance is equal parts a Sherlock Holmes story and a retelling of The Twa Sisters fairytale, and also a coherent installment in an ongoing historical fantasy series about elemental mages in early 1900s England.

47) What are the last three books you read? Indexing by Seanan McGuire, Die in Plain Sight by Elizabeth Lowell, Pirate's Honor by Chris A Jackson

50) What kind of book have you never read but always hope to find at some point in the future? This is such a fascinating question. I don't know that there's anything in particular that I've always wanted and never found, but there are things I'm always looking for more and better examples of. I'm extremely picky about soulmate AUs, so a good one especially captivates me. Oh, or a really well-handled impromptu adoption! Child characters and bureaucracy are both tricky to write and things I know a lot about, and when they're done well they hook me so hard.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

All the books I reviewed in 2023 (Novels)

Next Tuesday (December 5), I'm at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC, with my new solarpunk novel The Lost Cause, which 350.org's Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel: perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful."

It's that time of year again, when I round up all the books I reviewed for my newsletter in the previous year. I posted 21 reviews last year, covering 31 books (there are two series in there!). I also published three books of my own last year (two novels and one nonfiction). A busy year in books!

Every year, these roundups remind me that I did actually manager to get a lot of reading done, even if the list of extremely good books that I didn't read is much longer than the list of books I did read. I read many of these books while doing physiotherapy for my chronic pain, specifically as audiobooks I listened to on my underwater MP3 player while doing my daily laps at the public pool across the street from my house.

After many years of using generic Chinese waterproof MP3s players – whose quality steadily declined over a decade – I gave up and bought a brand-name player, a Shokz Openswim. So far, I have no complaints. Thanks to reader Abbas Halai for recommending this!

https://shokz.com/products/openswim

I load up this gadget with audiobook MP3s bought from Libro.fm, a fantastic, DRM-free alternative to Audible, which is both a monopolist and a prolific wage-thief with a documented history of stealing from writers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

All right, enough with the process notes, on to the reviews!

NOVELS

I. Temeraire by Naomi Novik

One of the finest pleasures in life is to discover a complete series of novels as an adult, to devour them right through to the end, and to arrive at that ending to discover that, while you'd have happily inhabited the author's world for many more volumes, you are eminently satisfied with the series' conclusion.

I just had this experience and I am still basking in the warm glow of having had such a thoroughly fulfilling imaginary demi-life for half a year. I'm speaking of the nine volumes in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, which reimagines the Napoleonic Wars in a world that humans share with enormous, powerful, intelligent dragons.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/temeraire/#but-i-am-napoleon

II. Destroyer of Worlds by Matt Ruff

The Destroyer of Worlds is a spectacular followup to Lovecraft Country that revisits the characters, setting, and supernatural dread of the original. Country was structured as a series of linked novellas, each one picking up where the previous left off, with a different focal characters. Destroyer is a much more traditional braided novel, moving swiftly amongst the characters and periodically jumping back in time to the era of American slavery, retelling the story of the settlement of the Great Dismal swamp by escaped slaves.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/21/the-horror-of-white-magic/#anti-lovecraftian

III. Scholomance by Naomi Novik

The wizards of the world live in constant peril from maleficaria – the magic monsters that prey on those born with magic, especially the children. In a state of nature, only one in ten wizard kids reaches adulthood. So the wizarding world built the Scholomance, a fully automated magical secondary school that exists in the void – a dimension beyond our world. The Scholomance is also an extremely dangerous place – three quarters of the wizard children who attend will die before graduation – but it is much safer than life on the outside.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/29/hobbeswarts/#the-chosen-one

IV. Tsalmoth by Steven Brust

Longrunning Brust hero Vlad Taltos has been convinced to recount the story of how he and Cawti came to fall in love, and how they planned their marriage. This is quite an adventure – it plays out against the backdrop of a gang-war within the Jhereg organization, with Vlad in severe mortal peril that he can only avoid by uncovering an intricate criminal caper of crosses, double-crosses, smuggling and sorcery. But while Vlad is dodging throwing knives and lethal spells (or not!), what's really going on is that he and Cawti are falling deeply, profoundly, irrevocably in love. The romance that plays out among the blades and magic is more magical still, a grand passion that expresses itself through Nick-and-Nora wordplay and Three Musketeers swordplay.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/27/mannerpunk/#ask-anyone

V. Hopeland by Ian McDonald

Seriously what the fuck is this amazing, uncategorizable, unsummarizable, weird, sprawling, hairball of a novel? How the hell do you research – much less write – a novel this ambitious and wide-ranging? Why did I find myself weeping uncontrollably on a train yesterday as I finished it, literally squeezing my chest over my heart as it broke and sang at the same moment? The stars of Hopeland are members of two ancient, secret societies. There's Raisa Hopeland, who belongs to a globe-spanning, mystical "family," that's one part mutual aid, one part dance music subculture, and one part sorcerer (some Hopelanders are electromancers, making strange, powerful magic with Tesla coils). Amon is a composer and DJ who specializes in making music for very small groups of people – preferably just one person – that is so perfect for them that they are transformed by hearing it.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/30/electromancy/#the-grace

VI. The World Wasn't Ready For You by Justin Key

These are horror stories, though some of them are science fiction too, and more to the point, they're Black horror stories. In his afterword, Key writes about his early fascination with horror, the catharsis he felt in watching nightmares unspool on screen or off the page. And then, he writes, came the dawning recognition that the Black characters in these stories were always there as cannon-fodder, often nameless, usually picked off early. "Black horror" isn't merely parables about racism. In the deft hands of these writers – and now, Key – the stories are horror in which Blackness is a fact, sometimes a central one, and that fact is ever a complication, limiting how the characters move through space, interact with authority, and relate to one another.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/19/justin-c-key/#clarion-west-2015

VII. The Future by Naomi Alderman

A cracking, multi-point-of-view adventure novel about billionaires prepping for the end of the world. Three billionaires, the lords of thinly veiled analogs to Facebook, Google and Amazon, each getting ready in their own way. Stumbling into their midst comes Lai Zhen, a prepper influencer vlogger with millions of followers.

When Zhen becomes romantically entangled with Martha Einkorn, the top aide and chief-of-prepping for one of these billionaires, she finds herself in possession of an AI chatbot that is devoted to protecting a very small number of people from incipient danger. This chatbot determines that Zhen is being stalked by an assassin at a mall in Singapore, and guides her to safety.

The chatbot is a closely held secret among the tech billionaire cabal. It is designed to monitor world events and predict when The Event is imminent, be it disease, war, or other cataclysmic disaster. With the chatbot's predictive powers and its superhuman guidance, the billionaires, their families, and their closest confidantes will be able to slip away before the shit hits the fan, fly by different private jets to one or another luxury bunker, and wait out the apocalypse. Once the fires raging without have died down to embers, the chatbot's billionaire charges will emerge to assume their places as wise and all-powerful leaders of the next human civilization.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/07/preppers-of-the-red-death/#the-event

VIII. Liberty's Daughter by Naomi Kritzer

There's so much sf about "competent men" running their families with entrepreneurial zeal, clarity of vision and a firm confident hand. But there's precious little fiction about how much being raised by a Heinlein dad would *suuuck*. But it would, and in *Liberty's Daughter*, we get a peek inside the nightmare.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent

Like I said, this has been a good year in books for me, and it included three books of my own:

I. Red Team Blues (novel, Tor Books US, Head of Zeus UK)

Martin Hench is 67 years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He lives and roams California in a very comfortable fully-furnished touring bus, The Unsalted Hash, that he bought years ago from a fading rock star. He knows his way around good food and fine drink. He likes intelligent women, and they like him back often enough. Martin is a—contain your excitement—self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He’s as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he’s a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike. He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. Now he’s been roped into a job that’s more dangerous than anything he’s ever agreed to before—and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

II. The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (nonfiction, Verso)

We can – we must – dismantle the tech platforms. We must to seize the means of computation by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users to leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission. Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet.

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

III. The Lost Cause (novel, Tor Books US, Head of Zeus UK)

For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial. It's just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks.

But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their anger. To their "alternative" news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that "climate change" is just a giant scam. And they're your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they're not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth. The Lost Cause asks: What do we do about people who cling to the belief that their own children are the enemy? When, in fact, they're often the elders that we love?

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

I wrote nine books during lockdown, and there's plenty more to come. The next one is The Bezzle, a followup to Red Team Blues, which comes out in February:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

While you're waiting for that one, I hope the reviews above will help you connect with some excellent books. If you want more of my reviews, here's my annual roundup from 2022:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/01/bookishness/#2022-in-review

Here's my book reviews from 2021:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/08/required-ish-reading/#bibliography

And here's my book reviews from 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#recommended-reading

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/01/bookmaker/#2023-in-review

[thechanelmuse]

My Book Review

Morgan Jerkins was trending during the release of Kendrick Lamar's Drake hit diss record, "Not Like Us," after culture vulture DJ Vlad attempted to get her fired from her teaching position at Princeton University for telling him to mind his mf business. Black folks digitally hemmed him up for his spiteful retaliation, and he began backpedaling only after he discovered Morgan is the niece of legendary producer Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins.

Seeing her name trend quickly made me recall her memoir, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots. It was one of my favorite reads of 2022. I headed to this site to reblog my review. Lo and behold I never posted one on here 🙃. So here we are.

From the moment I read the title, I knew this book would feel familiar, taking me back to the my early days of deep curiosity, personal discovery, and documented confirmation while uncovering the long paper trail of my ancestry and land. (For info on lineage tracing, refer to my post here.) 

Morgan Jerkins' familial journey through Georgia, Lowcountry South Carolina, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California made me think of my own as a granddaughter of grandparents who headed to New York during the Great Migration by way of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina extending to Louisa County, Virginia and Boley, Oklahoma. Morgan's memoir, which is divided into four sections, is engrossing, detailed, and reels you into a seat next to her on her journey.

Here's the book's blurb:

Between 1916 and 1970, six million Black Americans left their rural homes in the South for jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest in a movement known as The Great Migration. But while this event transformed the complexion of America and provided black people with new economic opportunities, it also disconnected them from their roots, their land, and their sense of identity, argues Morgan Jerkins. In this fascinating and deeply personal exploration, she recreates her ancestors’ journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took. Following in their footsteps, Jerkins seeks to understand not only her own past, but the lineage of an entire group of people who have been displaced, disenfranchised, and disrespected throughout our history. Through interviews, photos, and hundreds of pages of transcription, Jerkins braids the loose threads of her family’s oral histories, which she was able to trace back 300 years, with the insights and recollections of Black people she met along the way—the tissue of Black myths, customs, and blood that connect the bones of American history.

Genealogy is a never-ending process of search and discovery for Black Americans that's met with hidden documents and some areas paper genocide, due to destroyed documents, misclassification, and several stages of racial/ethnic reclassification for our ethnic group implemented by the US government since the 1790 census. I'm pretty sure even after concluding this book Morgan continued her search, working back through her long lines. It's layered like an onion. I've been working on mine for almost two decades reaching the 1600s for a few. It gives you a sense of awakening that's an everyday feeling. It'll never dissipate, especially being able to pull black the veil and unearth the identity of ancestors whose names haven't been said for hundreds of years.

[ya-world-challenge]

Book Review: The Conqueror's Saga by Kiersten White (🇷🇴  Romania)

[image 1: book trilogy covers: And I Darken, Now I Rise, Bright We Burn. On each cover a spear slashes through an object: a flower, a necklace, a pomegranate; image 2: map showing modern Romania; image 3: the view from Poenari castle in Romania - the walls of a stone fortress drop away to a steep mountainous landscape covered in green; source: wikimedia]

And I Darken; Now I Rise; Bright We Burn

Author: Kiersten White

YA World Challenge for 🇷🇴 Romania

I've seen some criticism of this series by Romanian reviewers, one of which is Lada's name (which I agree is odd), and others that are to be expected when you take a national hero (Vlad the Impaler), gender-flip him, and write him in love with the leader of an empire that oppressed your nation for centuries. So it's important to acknowledge this series as pure fiction. It did have me flipping through Wikipedias of the the real historical characters mentioned, many of whom I had never learned about before.

While much of the series (1 and 2 especially) take place in the Ottoman Empire (modern Turkey), the series follows the point of view of two siblings from Wallachia, a historical region of the modern state of Romania.

Review

Lada and her brother Radu are left as hostages of the Ottoman Empire as children to keep their father "loyal" as a vassal. I loved Lada's character from the beginning: strong-willed, possessive, brutal even as a child, and "ugly". The character-building was expert and the way the author weaves relationships and motivations in a complex tapestry, against a backdrop of a rich world.

And I Darken builds the siblings' relationship with the future sultan Mehmed, setting up that messy love triangle, and a scheme to get Mehmed on the throne. While Radu falls for Islam, Lada is never not wholly dedicated to Wallachia.

With Now I Rise, oh lord, the gay angst!... dear Radu. With Lada gone off to find support for her kingdom, Radu is left with his angst. We see the battle of Constantinople, and interconnected politics around Eastern Europe as Lada raises her army and searches for allies.

Bright We Burn, and Lada is ready to go full-on Impaler. The action was great, until... the entire climax and ending. I felt the finale really cheated Lada and did not serve her character. I didn't feel that book 3 lived up to its title. (And god, what a cringe epilogue!)

I have such mixed feelings about this series because it is incredibly well-written and engaging throughout, with an epic world and depth of character. But I dislike the ending the more I think about it. Without spoilers, I can just say that I think the whole feminist theme built up through the book fell apart in the end.

Books 1-2 I would have rated 4.5 stars, but Book 3 ultimately pulled the rating down.

Other reps: #muslim #gay #m/f #lesbian side characters #orthodox christian

Genres: #alternate history #drama #romance #adventure #war

★  ★  ★    3 stars

SPOILER rant under the cut:

In Book 2, the gunpowder lady said something to Radu - that Lada would be the type to go out with fire. With a title called Bright We Burn, I fully expected to see Lada going down as brightly and destructively as a meteorite, taking herself out with everything. What a disappointment.

The ending and Lada's forced 'submission' to Radu, by him taking away every last thing she had, under the guise of *compassion*, quite rankled me. It took away all the independence of her character that the series had built up from the beginning, and replaced it with nothing.

And. The. Kid. That epilogue. No, just no. I hate that such a promising series had to end with the cisheteronormative notion that "you must bear progeny to have a legacy". Fuck that. It completely threw away everything that Lada was just to have this "oh cute she acts like her mother" moment. 🤮 That and Radu vandalizing the church floor with his weak, misogynist scratchings.

It could have been so much better.

[thebibliosphere]

In somewhat humorous news, my mother got into a quandary today involving some former coworkers.

Before Hunger Pangs broke containment, I asked my mother not to tell people back home what my author name was because I didn't want to deal with the homophobia I'd get from certain family members if they knew I was writing queer romance. I also didn't want certain people to know because I knew they'd find my social media and fucking doxx me. Not out of any maliciousness, mind you, but just sheer fucking Internet safety incompetence.

Like we're talking the type of people who'll go onto your Instagram and use your full birth name-- regardless of your preferred name -- while asking if you remembered hanging out that one time near your parent's house-- you know, the place with the [RECOGNIZABLE LANDMARK] next to the [PRACTICALLY A GPS LOCATION.]

Yeah.

Anyway, my mother was cool with that because she also, quite frankly, didn't want people to know her only daughter was writing queer filth for a living. (Does anyone else remember when she told me I should apologize to @mothman-etd's mother for writing sex in my stories? Because I sure do.) That was until Hunger Pangs broke containment, and my mother, to her own shock, decided she was proud of me.

I think it was when she logged onto Amazon, expecting to see people one-starring it and calling it degenerate filth, but instead found over 300+ 5-star reviews screaming about how much they loved it and how much it meant to them, that she realized that maybe, sometimes, sex stories are okay.

(Amazingly, she pivoted and latched onto Vlad smoking being the worst thing about it and how I should be ashamed to write about characters that smoke, lol.)

Anyway. She bumped into an old coworker today and was so excited to tell them how well I was doing she forgot that a) she doesn't like telling people what I write about and b) I'd asked her not to tell certain people that it wasn't until she'd gotten through the whole "oh yes, doing very well, living in America writing books" spiel that she realized what she'd done and clamped her mouth shut.

She didn't name me or the book title, but it was too late because said former coworker went and told everyone else she used to work with, and now my mother's been invited to tea at the local church village tea shop with an ensemble of formidable gossips, specifically to talk about my book.

So, anyway, I may or may not be about to get accidentally doxxed, but my mother is the one about to walk into the local church and tell everyone the kid they threw out 20+ years ago for being a disobedient pain in the ass with Views about Christianity is now relatively popular online for writing best-selling queer romance novels about vampires and werewolves fucking in a soft BDSM dynamic, featuring blatant magic use and a prologue which talks explicitly about imprisoning and killing God(s).

*jazz hands*

[mendedrum]

Carpe Jugulum Review

This book is still pretty much standard Witches Fare ngl. The story only really started to pick up when Mightily Oats got more fleshed out, becoming this sort of Van Helsing character. His conversations with Esmeralda Weatherwax were fascinating. I honestly would like to get the physical book just for those scenes.

Meanwhile the Vlad/Agnes parts gave me Howl/Sophie (from Howl's Moving Castle) vibes. It was very entertaining.

I liked the character of Igor too.

Anyhow, i would have loved to see more of Oats/Agnes. I hope they still have another chance in the next books. They remind me of Victor/Ginger, Vimes/Sybil and Mort/Ysabell a lot.

[dapurinthos]

I was disappointed to hear that The Last Voyage of the Demeter was mediocre. I may be able to suggest a possible pick-me-up alternative though? Having not (yet) managed to get my hands on a copy, I can't speak to its quality, but towards the top of my book buying list is a queer horror novella about Dracula's voyage to England; José Luis Zárate's "The Route of Ice and Salt". It seems to have good reviews, so perhaps you (and hopefully I) would enjoy it?

ooh, i'll have to add it to the list (and the pile. the pile that ever grows and never shrinks)

(why hast thou forsaken me, library, and closed down the 'suggest a purchase' page that art my beloved?)

my favourite demeter-adjacent book will probably always remain vlad the undead in which a university student discovers the journal of the demeter's captain, as dictated to her great-grandfather.

[ufonaut]

are you liking the jsa series? i’ve been reading reviews on comic geeks, tumblr, and other websites and it seemed pretty well liked until i went onto twitter and i’ve seen like majority of justice society of america fans there hate it. either because of retcons like judy garrick and huntress’ future jsa or the fact that’s it’s geoff johns on the jsa again. thanks for your time!

AM I LIKING THE JSA ONGOING!!!!! if you go into any jsa-related tags chances are 90% of it consists of my billions of panels posted after each new issue so, yes, i'm loving the new jsa series and i think that's plenty obvious from a glance at my blog. i don't think you can count most people on here or twitter as jsa fans though lmao interacting with out of context pages from afar hardly warrants their opinions being taken seriously

the new golden age initiative is the best thing to have happened to the justice society since the '76 revival and in many ways, it's a genuine return to form for most of the team -- both in characterisation (like in alan scott's case) and in the actual physical return of legitimate golden age characters like jimmy martin, the newsboy legion, little boy blue & the blue boys etc etc. like man, outside of roy thomas, i really can't name a single other writer who's as knowledgeable as geoff about the literal golden age of comics and who loves these characters half as much. it may be hard to admit for those among us who don't think doomsday clock is the best comic ever published (which i certainly do stand by forever) but geoff's kept the jsa alive for thirty years and counting and we owe him a great deal despite the occasional misstep.

i also love judy garrick! i love the future jsa! i love this take on teddy knight's future! i love vlad & ruby sokov! i'm here for all of it and i'll never get over how strange (and i'm being kind here) it is that most complaints come from infinity inc enjoyers as if every part of that series isn't the retcon to end all retcons.

i've got my misgivings about a detail or two, there's a couple characters getting the spotlight when i'd personally much rather forget their existence all together, but all in all? best damn book on the stands right now and you better believe i'm buying every issue & every variant like my life depends on it!

[unloneliest]

I posted 13,683 times in 2022

That's 13,180 more posts than 2021!

289 posts created (2%)

13,394 posts reblogged (98%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@milfygerard

@lesdienne

@asterlark

@elytrians

@hoob-gooblin

I tagged 7,161 of my posts in 2022

Only 48% of my posts had no tags

#tmg - 408 posts

#mcr - 376 posts

#jam posts - 306 posts

#leverage - 302 posts

#trc - 281 posts

#q - 208 posts

#yell - 195 posts

#queer tag - 156 posts

#omgcp - 136 posts

#scream - 113 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#w  last limit of bhakti i know my listening experience isn't the average i just have permanent brain worms about eliot spencer from leverage

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

have any tumblr tmg fans seen the sanguinare speculation? i’ve seen discussion on the subreddit - apparently there were postcards given out at the merch table last night with a qr code leading to this website (front of the postcard was the image from the website). folks on the subreddit are thinking it might be a surprise album drop, especially considering how long it’s been since they last released new music & the original plan for dark in here.

246 notes - Posted May 18, 2022

#4

season 2 eliot..... they put gender in him

285 notes - Posted April 29, 2022

#3

rewatching s3 e1 of leverage is like. top ten pictures taken moments before a disaster (eliot realizing he hasn't escaped moreau's influence over his life and that from here on out he will be living with either the inevitability of the team finding out about his past or the reality of them having found out). rewatching the rest of season 3 is like watching him be put through a slow motion hydraulic press. it's soooooooooooooooo

376 notes - Posted September 11, 2022

#2

listen. i always liked werewolves more than vampires, and that’s because i just never really got the appeal of vampires - i was like, vampire-neutral. happy they existed because i know how much my friends love them. so i’m fairly certain the absolute first thing i said when i surfaced from reading @thebibliosphere‘s hunger pangs: true love bites is “i get it about vampires now.” 

i absolutely did not go into reading expecting to adore vlad as much as i do, but oh my god, is this what enjoying vampires has been like for the rest of you this entire time????? why did nobody tell me! seriously!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i cannot recommend reading this enough, i’m never going to shut up about how much i love this book, & yes, that’s fully with the intent of being a fandom pied piper & dragging you all into this interest with me.

611 notes - Posted February 11, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

for anyone who was missing it: the annotated mountain goats is back online!

for any tmg fans who haven’t heard of the annotated mountain goats before: it’s an awesome resource for lyrics & info on songs, and it’s been an absolute cornerstone of my goats listening experience since i started listening - check it out!

736 notes - Posted February 16, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[bowieforking]

I posted 574 times in 2022

That's 215 more posts than 2021!

2 posts created (0%)

572 posts reblogged (100%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@hannibalatemyheart

@yilinglaozuhot

@ao3-brihna

@veresfika

@spiritofcamelot

I tagged 94 of my posts in 2022

#devil judge - 6 posts

#a star war - 6 posts

#dracula daily - 4 posts

#our friend vlad - 3 posts

#heartstopper - 3 posts

#the best show - 2 posts

#signal boost - 2 posts

#obi-wan kenobi - 2 posts

#asexuality - 2 posts

#lgbtq+ - 2 posts

Longest Tag: 88 characters

#so mad they got all this screen time and kate and anthony resolution was like 30 seconds

My Top Posts in 2022:

#2

I managed to wash my sheets and put them back on my bed in the same day and I would like an award please

0 notes - Posted June 26, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Today at my library I walk into work and half the building lights are off and my co-worker is walking around with a kids book that makes bird noises held above his head pressing buttons to sound out random birds calls. Apparently there are two (2) birds that got in through the open doors to due A/C not being on yet and the building feeling like a sauna.

The birds cannot be got to leave, and have been given the run of the building. Bird poo has already been cleaned up once. Suggestions have been made about getting an emergency library cat, calling a local natural center, and also making loud noises?? but staff moral is low and care about the birds being made to leave is decreasing by the minute.

**Update, it is eight hours later and we are approaching closing time  and one bird can no longer be found at all. The remaining bird is hoped to be convinced to return from whence it came when we close and can turn off the lights again and somehow make the exit doors look appealing to birds????

0 notes - Posted May 6, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →