#sydney khoo

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads

The Spider And Her Demons

YA Australian urban fantasy/horror

about a Malaysian-Chinese girl who’s half spider-demon, just trying to keep her head down and survive high school

when she accidentally kills and eats a man in front of the most popular girl at school, they strike up a strange friendship and she starts to learn more about herself and the supernatural world

aroacespec/sapphic ish

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

hello again fellow denizens of our beloved hellsite, once again i need assistance in picking my Next Book To Read (after i finish this nonfic and perhaps also HILL HOUSE). these are all somehow adjacent to the writing project i'm working on, so i might even read them in order of Victor to Loser (though i reserve the right to say nah).

please help me select my next read based on ZERO propaganda, only titles and cover vibes.

here are all their beautiful faces:

button-press away!!

[layaart]

Zhi from The Spider & Her Demons by sydney khoo!

[homerjacksons]

💚🤍 Happy Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week 🩶🖤

[x]

[bookaddict24-7]

New Young Adult Releases! (August 15th, 2023)

___

Have I missed any new Young Adult releases? Have you added any of these books to your TBR? Let me know!

___

New Standalones/First in a Series:

Tilly in Technicolor by Mazey Eddings

Disappearing Act by Jiordan Castle

The Last Girls Standing by Jennifer Dugan

Forgive Me Not by Jennifer Baker

Holly Horror by Michelle Jabès Corpora

The Spider & Her Demons by Sydney Khoo

New Sequels:

Fracturing Fate (Breaking Time #2) by Sasha Alsberg

___

Happy reading!

[good-books-to-read]

Title & Author: The spider and her demons by Sydney Khoo

Score: 96/100

Comments: I could not put down this book at all it was so good, I love the characters and the story. I really hope there is another book, and if not I hope the authors writes more.

Also that cover is amazing

Link: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/ce75afc8-33c5-4b06-b29e-25ec1f665941

[good-books-to-read]

I’m just going to throw some of my favourites down

Middle grade:

The spider and her demons by Sydney Khoo

Small spaces by Katherine Arden

Girl (in real life) by Tamsin Winter

Zachary Ying and the dragon emperor by Xiran Jay Zhao

YA:

Akarnae by Lynette Noni

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

Illumnae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Dread nation by Justina Ireland

Adult:

The house in the cerulean sea TJ Klune

The invited by Jennifer McMahon

Does anyone have any book recs? Any genre/format is good, I’m not leaning toward anything in particular I just wanna read something and as we all know asking google is a crapshoot

[sixcostumerefs]

Happy Asian and Pacific Islander Month to our queens!

Here in the US, May is Asian-American and Pacific Islander month. So just like last year, I'll be highlighting the Asian and Pacific Islander queens of Six. This year is especially fun as there's currently an Asian or Pacific Islander queen in every currently-running replica production of Six!

Pictured: Aragon: Grace Mouat (Burmese, 1st UK Tour and West End), Nicole Kyoung-mi Lambert (Korean, pre-Broadway regional tour and Broadway); Jasmine Shen (Chinese/Hong Konger, Breakaway 1.0); Chloé Zuel (Mauritian, 2020 Sydney); Phoenix Jackson Mendoza (Filipino, 2021-23 Aus Tour); Kristina Leopold (Chinese/Thai/Indian, Broadway/Boleyn Tour); 이아름솔/Lee Arum-soul (Korean, South Korea); 손승연/Sonnet (Korean, South Korea) Boleyn: Andrea Macasaet (Filipino, pre-Broadway regional tour and Broadway); Cherelle Jay (West End and 2nd UK Tour); Amanda Lindgren (South Korean, West End); Sunayna Smith (Indian, Breakaway 3.0 and 5.0); 김지우/Kim Ji-woo (Korean, South Korea); 배수정/Pae Su-jeong (Korean, South Korea); Fiorella Bamba (Filipino, Bliss 6.0); Thảo Therése Nguyễn (Vietnamese, West End) Seymour: Jasmine Forsberg (Filipino, Aragon Tour/Broadway); 박혜나/Park Hye-na (Korean, South Korea); 박가람 /Park Ga-ram (Korean, South Korea); Singh Viki (Indian, Hungarian non-replica) Cleves: 김지선/Kim Ji-sun (Korean, South Korea); 최현선/Choi Hyun-sun (Korean, South Korea); Danielle Mendoza (Filipino, Breakaway 3.0/Boleyn Tour); Kardffy Aisha (Persian, Hungarian non-replica) Howard: Jaina Brock-Patel (Desi/Indian, 2nd UK Tour); Zoe Jensen (Filipino, Broadway); 김려원/Kim Ryeo-won (Korean, South Korea); 솔지/Solji (Korean, South Korea); Elysia Cruz (Filipino, Canadian); Hien (Vietnamese, Hungarian non-replica); Sierra Fermin (Filipino, Broadway); Alizé Ke'Aloha Cruz (Filipina, Bliss 3.0/Boleyn Tour) Parr: Shimali de Silva (Hong Konger/Sri Lankan, original student cast); Vidya Makan (Desi/Indian heritage, 2020 and 2021-23 Australian Tours); Shannen Alyce Quan (Eurasian, 2020 and 2021-23 Australian Tours); Karis Oka (2020 and 2021-23 Australian Tours); Megan Leung (Chinese/Hong Konger, Bliss 2.0 and Breakaway 5.0); Roxanne Couch (Maori, West End); Joy N Woods (Southeast Asian and/or Pacific Islander, Broadway); Elena Breschi (Filipino, Breakaway 4.0) 유주혜/Yoo Ju-hye (Korean, South Korea); 홍지희/Hong Ji-hee (Korean, South Korea); Aoife Haakenson (Taiwanese, UK Tour); Lauren Mariaoosay (Indian/Polynesian/Malaysian/Cambodian, Canada) Notes: - All information is from this post. There may be additional info or queens missing, as it's only information I specifically have been able to verify. This list also doesn't encompass the full breadth of many queens' identities; many of them are of mixed race and ethnicity, or of several nationalities. That post provides further information. - I usually don't include actors who haven't debuted. That means that Kimberley Hodgson and Deirdre Khoo (both of the recently-announced Australian Tour) and Fia Houston-Hamilton (cancelled Breakaway 2.0) are not included.

Credits: Aragon: anniekwithacamera; Lloyd Bishop; _jasmine_shen_; jamesmorganphoto; sixthemusicalau, unsure of origin; ymduck_pic; _young_img Boleyn: Sara Crulwich; jonalderson_; Pamela Raith; sunaynasmith; _young_img; _shannon1025_, unsure of origin; fiorellabamba; Pamela Raith Seymour: Joan Marcus; hbiiii._.iin; jjang_beautiful; Szabina Jardek Cleves: hbiiii._.iin; gren_pic; Joan Marcus; Szabina Jardek Howard: Pamela Raith, Joan Marcus, day_star_._, 890110kr; Joan Marcus; Szabina Jardek; sierrafermin; Joan Marcus Parr: sixthemusical, unsure of origin; sixthemusicalau, unsure of origin; daynaransleyphoto; daynaransleyphoto; meganswleung; Pamela Raith; michaelah.jpg; elenabreschi; yoozuyoozu, unsure of origin; jjang_beautiful; Pamela Raith; Joan Marcus

[fahye]

book recs: aug-sept '23

THE BAYOU by arden powell -- queer horror novella! this is set in 1930s louisiana and like all good horror it's about horrible unburied secrets haunting you. but also gators and summer flooding and guilt and, uh, letting a hot mysterious man/fae/?other? rail you in a church. superb. no notes.

TELL ME I'M WORTHLESS by alison rumfitt -- MORE QUEER HORROR! TRANS HORROR!! this is a haunted house book but the haunting is modern british fascism and the house is made of TERFs. the writing is fantastic. it's like being trapped in a small room with someone who is screaming loudly and endlessly, but like, in a good way.

THE SECRET COUNTRY by pamela dean -- this is an oldschool portal fantasy that somehow manages to combine excellent diana wynne jones vibes with my most common stress nightmare, ie. the one where you're in the Show but you've been so busy choreographing for the Show that you've forgotten to learn your own lines. baffling. very enjoyable.

KNOCKOUT by sarah maclean -- listen. listen. this series is about a historical vigilante girl gang, and this is the romance between a lady explosives expert and the exasperated policeman she wants very much to bang (heheh. bang.) very miss fisher vibes and also, somehow, very Fuck The Police (...heheh.) I adored it.

AN ISLAND PRINCESS STARTS A SCANDAL by adriana herrera -- a very horny and fun f/f histrom about a venezuelan artist in paris and the duchess she is, again, extremely determined to bang. I love this series of adriana's, with all its glorious historical detail about the various latinx delegations to the grand paris exhibition.

THE SPIDER AND HER DEMONS by sydney khoo -- YA fantasy about a chinese-malaysian australian girl who is also, inconveniently, a spider demon. this has an aro-ace heroine and heaps of very cool and creepy body horror and made me desperate to go back to sydney and eat banh mi in cabramatta. a+.

WHITE CAT, BLACK DOG by kelly link -- so you know how kelly link is an absolute genius master of the short story form? you know how the best fairytale retellings are both chattily straightforward and bonkers weird? YEAH. my god this collection is so good.

[bookshelvesandtealeaves]

💕 INTERNATIONAL FRIENDSHIP DAY 💕

Today is International Friendship Day and I just think it’s so sweet this exists tbh. My friends are my rock, they bring me so much joy and love and I wouldn’t be here without them.

I’ve put together a stack of books with some of my fave fictional friendships but I’ve almost definitely missed some great ones so let me know what you’d have included!

[instagram]

Books pictured:

💕Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Hereing Blake

💕Loveless by Alice Oseman

💕Radio Silence by Alice Oseman

💕Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

💕To Be Taught, if Fortunate by Becky Chambers

💕Eleanor Jones is Not a Murderer by Amy Doak

💕The Spider and Her Demons by sydney khoo

💕The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

💕Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan

💕Something Wild and Wonderful by Anita Kelly

💕The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

💕Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

💕Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur

💕Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall

💕The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun

💕Heartstopper by Alice Oseman

💕The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

💕Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson

💕The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

💕The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

[aro-who-reads]

Aro book review: The Spider and Her Demons by sydney khoo

(the book from my last post(s) )

I think the MC Zhi is actually aroace-coded! I just didn't find any reviews that mentioned it when I first found it...

I really loved this! It took over my brain for the day or so I was reading it.

The main character Zhi is a Malaysian Chinese girl who is part spider-demon. She accidentally kills and eats a man, and begins to form a friendship with the mysterious and popular girl from school who saw her do it.

It's also very Australian, which I really enjoyed! It's fun when there are scenes in places I've at least visited...

Zhi makes a lot of statements about not wanting/expecting romance and sex, and never seems to think about it if it isn't brought up by someone else. There's also some nice commentary on relationship hierarchies!

In any other book I would have assumed Zhi and her new friend were going to get together (apparently they are meant to be heading towards something (qpr-ish?). Even if they got together romantically I'd still probably see her as somewhere on the aroace spectrum.

Definitely recommend, especially if you like urban fantasy! I bought it on a whim but I definitely don't regret it.

[aroaessidhe]

Emerging authors person here! I need to pick an emerging author for a class but I don't really pick up brand new books till years after, so I just have no clue. I like fantasy and scifi best and I don't really like romance!

haha okay sure. well off the top of my head here's some recent debut sff books I liked a lot (that have romance generally as a side thing, if any). This is a very random list! but maybe there's something here you'd be interested in

The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei - beautiful sci-fi mystery/thriller about a murder on a deep space mission, not really any romance. she has another book coming out this year too

Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel - historical fantasy retelling, with an aroace MC. and she has another book that just came out, I'm about to read it

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera - a very weird and surreal Sri Lankan fantasy that is def not for everyone but also I can't stop thinking about it.. (he has a lot of short story publications under his belt but I believe this is his debut novel)

The Butterfly Assassin - YA thriller / dystopian trilogy, just completed (I haven't read book 3 yet!), about a traumatised teen assassin trying to live a normal life. no romance

The Spider and Her Demons by sydney khoo - YA paranormal about a girl who's part spider demon and accidentally eats a man in front of the popular girl. they become friends

idk what your class counts as recent/emerging but The Scapegracers (2020) by H.A. Clarke is a recently completed YA trilogy about feral teen witches that I love SO so much. also and his adult debut Metal From Heaven comes out later this year (I read an arc it's great)

Fallen Thorns by Harvey Oliver Baxter - aroace urban fantasy/academia vibes vampire coming of age

To Shape A Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose - YA* fantasy about an Indigenous girl who finds a dragon and is made to go to the coloniser's dragon school. has the starts of f/f/m polyamory subplot (*is marketed as adult but feels YA to me, maybe it'll age up with the series though)

also if if counts The Vanished Birds (2020) and The Spear Cuts Through Water (2022) by Simon Jimenez - the vanished birds is a great sci-fi and spear is one of the best fantasy books I've read in years (I guess I'd consider it to have a significant romance but also it's not like A Romance where that takes up most of the plot, if that makes sense. it's the kind of subtle romance my aro ass loves anyway.)

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

24 in 2024

i haven't seen any of these floating around yet, so i thought i'd get one started! here are 24 books i want to read in 2024 (and a bonus readerly goal):

Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives by Sarah Williams Goldhagen

Obsolescence: An Architectural History by Daniel M. Abramson

Offended Sensibilities by Alisa Ganieva

The Night, The Night by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón

Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

Dawn by Sevgi Soysal

Trashlands by Alison Stine

The Girl in Red by Christina Henry

How to be Eaten by Maria Adelmann

The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang

The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown

Black Tide by KC Jones

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

The Ambergris Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer

The Great Cities Duology by NK Jemisin

The Spider and her Demons by sydney khoo

A Shining by Jon Fosse

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology edited by Vince A Liaguno and Rena Mason

Self-Portrait with Nothing by Aimee Pokwatka

Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

Unexpected Places to Fall From, Unexpected Places to Land by Malcolm Devlin

Always North by Vicki Jarrett

At the Edge of the Woods by Masatsugu Ono

Bonus Readerly Goal: i'm gonna try REALLY hard to only buy a book after i read five (5), this year (pre-orders DNI). gotta get that backlist under control SOMEhow, right??

notes on the color-coding: the green books are Just Because books (with a couple little red riding hood adjacent retellings in there, which is writing-project-related). a few of these came in a translation subscription box, and i am Interested in Architecture, and i'd love to read more of both this year.

the blue ones are bookmarked for nano prep (i wanna write something fucked up about space this year, i think, it's still cooking). i know it's early for that, but The Vibes™ have to marinate for a while. will probably add some haunted house books to this part of the list!

lastly, the purple ones are driscoll adjacent! filling my words well with related vibes worked well, this year, and i want to do that again next year. since i read through the entirety of my previous ~driscoll vibes~ stack last year, i've been restocking it, so most of these are very recently purchased.

(please note that all this color-coding/explanatory text is absolutely optional and Extra™, if you want to play--you can add it if you'd like, but by no means feel Obligated To Do So lol)

tagging @asexualbookbird, @six-of-ravens/@sixofravens-reads, @agardenandlibrary, @freckles-and-books, and anyone else who wants to play!

[layaart]

a few extra spider & her demons sketches 🕷

[auslgbtqya]

The Spider and Her Demons by sidney khoo

(2023)

From the Publisher:

Uncover an extraordinary world of demons and witches, where the ones you love can hurt you the most and hiding your true self can get you killed.

Moving and funny by turns, this is a story about what it takes to make peace with your demons – literal or otherwise. An urban fantasy spin on growing up as a second-generation immigrant, struggling under the overwhelming pressure to make others proud, while feeling trapped inside your own body.

Between surviving high school and working at her aunt’s dumpling shop, all Zhi wants is to find time for her friends . . . and make sure no one finds out she’s half spider-demon.

But when she accidentally kills and eats a man in front of the most popular girl in school, she discovers she might not be the scariest thing in the shadows.

sydney khoo is a recipient of Penguin Random House Australia’s Write It fellowship program, which aspires to find, nurture and develop unpublished writers across all genres, with a focus on underrepresented sections of our community.

Goodreads

[littlereadsandteas]

The Spider and Her Demons by sydney khoo is a captivating read for young adult readers who crave stories about self-discovery, identity, and the power of embracing one's true self, particularly those from diverse backgrounds and the LGBTQIA+ community, who will find solace in Zhi's relatable struggles and triumphant journey.