The Friend Zone Experiment

The Friend Zone Experiment, Zen Cho, 2024 romance novel. Cho is better known for fantasy but this is a straight-up contemporary het romance, and while I liked it a lot (and thought it was fun seeing Cho genre-hop) I would probably only recommend it to people who like het romance in general and not so much anyone who was considering whether they like Cho so much they would follow her across any genre. I, like I said, liked it a lot; I enjoy the Malaysian-English voice of her characters (here a Singaporean Chinese woman and Malaysian man living in London) and I thought the subplots about difficult family and business corruption wove together nicely with the core second-chance-romance plot.

Sacred Bodies

Sacred Bodies, Ver, 2024 graphic work. This is a 55-page full-color comic about a human person and a giant bird-person person who get married for ritual reasons and then have to figure out what that means for them. It is really good and interestingly speculative around topics of what is taboo/exploration of taboo. Kinky or maybe kink-adjacent; content notes for nudity and violence. Purchasable online here, or if you are a Hugo nominator I personally know who thinks they might be interested in it as a 2024 graphic work, especially if you are a Hugo nominator from whom I frequently borrow books, I'd be happy to share my PDF for that purpose.