psocoptera

Coffeeshop In An Alternate Universe, CB Lee, 2025 YA fantasy romance. As you would guess from the title, this was cute and sweet. Felt very Diane Duane Young Wizards - in fact I found an interview where Lee mentions that Deep Wizardry is a favorite book of theirs. The romance is a light, meet-cute, low-conflict relationship and didn't have much zing for me as a romance but was an enjoyable story about these nice girls who happened to be having a romance, if that makes sense as a distinction.

Also, I think this concludes my Lodestar reading - I'm not reading the Hunger Games book, I think Oathbound is number three of the Arthurian series and while the first one was interesting I already failed to read number two and this is apparently not even the end, and the remaining one is also book three of some series I don't even care to start. So that leaves me with Among Ghosts, Coffeeshop, and They Bloom at Night, in that order, and that feels like a reasonable amount of reading and ranking to me.

They Bloom At Night, Trang Thanh Tran, 2025 YA fantasy/horror novel. The writing style didn't click for me - metaphors that didn't make sense to me, jarring subject changes, emotional beats that came out of nowhere - but the overall shape of the story she was trying to tell was interesting, and there were some good vivid images. I will probably be comfortable ranking it for the Lodestar ahead of all the ones I don't intend to read at all.

Ancestral Night, Elizabeth Bear, 2019 novel, series up for the Series Hugo. Long and slow and repetitive and tedious. I just have no patience for this kind of thing any more - if I'm not being entertained by anything interesting happening, or the writing isn't aesthetically pleasing in itself, why the fuck am I slogging through your book? I think I need to rethink my relationship to the Hugos and possibly, alas, to my very dear friends' book club... I had a good run of taking pride in diligently doing the Hugo reading and it's fun to be participating in doing a thing but maybe it's not actually enough fun for the labor involved.

The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow, 2025 fantasy novel. Certainly *felt* everlasting. Great concept, about national mythos and its uses, but I just didn't find it that enjoyable or fun to read. I mean, not terrible - Harrow did a good job of inventing a world that is not Britain and a legend that is not the Matter of Britain while also being about those things, and it is interesting to see when someone manages to come up with something new to do with all that - but it might have had more punch as a novella instead of drawing it out.

The Other Shore, Rebecca Campbell, 2025 collection. Is this something I'm supposed to be reading for the Hugos? No. Is it an ebook I've been in the queue for for months that has now inconveniently come available right at Packet Time? Also no. However, it is a paperback I've had checked out for Way Too Long, so, finally finishing it is something, at least.

Ten stories here, eight previous published, of which I am sure I had read two and it's possible I read a third. Definitely recommended if you like her work.

"The High Lonesome Frontier" - Tor.com, 2016. (This is the one I might have read.) A song, the folk process, and how even in the information age something like a song is both transient and specific to time and performance and people. (Campbell is very good at specificity, concreteness of detail.)

"A Hole Cut in the Wall of the World" - This one is a mix of "men taking academic credit for women's ideas in the background" and "what if the revival of ancient ritual magic worked" - it's set in 1976 and if someone had told me that Le Guin wrote it in 1976 I would have believed it. (Well maybe the 80s for Le Guin specifically.)

"Lares Familiares 1981" - Liminal Stories, 2017. I liked this one - a logging family and a fae.

"On Highway 18" - The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2017. Also good - about friends growing apart, and urban legends, and the difficulty of knowing what actually happened, what kind of predator or pattern got someone.

"The Other Shore" - Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirits of Place, 2016. I liked this one a lot. An archaeological dig that starts turning up wildly mixed-up artifacts.

"Thank You for Your Patience" - Reckoning Magazine, 2020. I recommended this in my 2020 short science fiction reading and considered nominating it in 2021 but did not; I had her novelette "An Important Failure" on my novelette nominees and might have wanted to diversify authors a little, or might have just decided I liked other stories better. Anyways, a great story about the inhumanity of call centers and worker exploitation in general.

"The Bletted Woman" - The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2021. I thought I had recently read a review of a book along a similar line - maybe added it to my to-read list? But I can't find it now. Anyways, a woman with terminal illness decides to join an experiment attempting to make translators between the natural world and the human world. A good zombie story.

"Such Thoughts are Unproductive" - Clarkesworld, 2019. I did nominate this in 2020; it's the story that made me a Campbell fan in the first place. The total-surveillance, totalitarian state. Only more chilling now that we're so much further into the AI era.

"Wider than the Sky, Deeper than the Sea" - Another story about trying to bridge human and nature, this time as performance art. Campbell has such profound grief for what's being lost to the climate collapse, the Pacific Northwest ecosystems specifically because that's where she is (and that's where many of these stories are set). I really appreciate her as a voice for that. Interesting stuff about sacrifice and suffering for art and whether that's a good choice.

"Conclusion: An Incomplete Catalogue of Miraculous Births, or, Secrets of the Uterus Abscondita" - Shimmer Magazine, 2018. This one didn't really work for me.

Notes from a Regicide, Isaac Fellman, 2026 novel. I did not think much of the other of Fellman's books I've read, the 2022 novella The Two Doctors Gorski, but I'd seen this one recommended highly by people whose opinions I respect, so figured it was worth a try. And I'm glad I did: I didn't completely love it, but I definitely liked it more than Two Doctors. It is a very slow book and low on plot; mostly a lot of very detailed character study. Closest comparison maybe something like Malafrena, a nineteenth-century Romantic novel being written in the modern day, in this case set in the medium-far future and principally concerned with (what seemed to me like) a very now-specific experience of transness, and secondarily alcoholism and/or being an artist.

Me being me I was most interested in the speculative elements, and since my ebook expires at midnight let me put a bunch of quotes behind the cut and talk a little about some worldbuilding choices.

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A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel, KJ Charles, romance novel. Sequel to The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, following a minor character from that book some years later. You don't absolutely need to have read that one but this one will spoil many events of that one so I would probably read them in order for maximum fun. Like the previous, Charles is very good at making a plot conflict a relationship conflict and vice-versa. Good stuff.

Saltcrop, Yume Kitasei, 2025 science fiction novel. Two sisters in a post-collapse near future sail in search of the third. By description this sounded like something I would be into but I wouldn't have finished it if I hadn't been reading it for a book club; I just never wanted to know that much what was going to happen next. There was one cool vivid scene on the boat with unexpected music and an aurora and phosphorescent whales, I liked that. And I guess I'm interested in different takes on this kind of world and this was one.

A Song for You & I, K. O'Neill, 2025 graphic. Beautifully drawn and colored coming-of-age fantasy in which a pegasus-riding trainee ranger befriends a violin-playing shepherd and mutual personal growth ensues. Quiet, simple, and lovely, perfect for fans of Kiki's Delivery Service or maybe Blue Delliquanti's Across a Field of Starlight.

Strange Bedfellows, Ariel Slamet Ries, 2025 graphic. Also YA; a college dropout in a good-future space colony ("utopian" feels more laden than I want to say here) develops a late-blooming superpower to bring things from his dreams into reality, including his high school crush. A terrific premise that didn't always work for me, especially reading it right after Song for You & I. They're very similar books at the core - two young people whose interaction helps each of them figure out what's holding them back - but felt very different to read, in a couple of ways.

Song is, like I mentioned, beautiful - it's set in a medieval-ish world that values harmony with nature, and drawn with a lot of attention and panel space given to scenery, from big vistas to close-ups of specific birds or plants, Miyazaki-style, a slow detailed richness of the world around the characters that gives the characters more emotional weight. Very peaceful and relaxing to read. Bedfellows, on the other hand, is in a very busy high-tech future, and the art reflects that - crowded pages, crowded panels, crowd scenes, a couple of different ensembles of secondary characters, inclusion of text elements like search results and chats and social media (some of which was so low-contrast I skimmed over it rather than squinting to read every word). An effective match of content and style - but *a lot*, sometimes to the point of being overwhelming.

And then also, Song is very, very chaste - the big romantic climax is a kiss on the cheek - which felt reasonable for the Miyazaki-like tone and possibly middle-grade audience. Bedfellows, on the other hand, is also weirdly chaste, with a Big Deal being made out of a couple of kisses, and... it just felt off to me? Like, yes, Not Everything Has To Be Porn, but something felt infantilizing to me about the way the relationships of these nominally college-aged young adults were rendered suitable for a younger-YA audience. Dreams are such fertile territory for the weird, the disturbing, the unsanitized, the id, but here they're pastel, quirky, dragons and unicorns. There was a one-off line about the idea of making out with your own dream-projection being masturbatory that felt particularly prudish, like, what's wrong with that, exactly? I'm sure not everybody would immediately fuck their dream of their high school crush if they projected that dream into reality but would a twenty-year-old really be scandalized by the *idea*? It felt like the kind of pearl-clutching neo-puritanism you sometimes get on Tumblr, the "there is s*x here MINORS LOOK AWAY" nonsense, and I think I personally would have found this book more interesting if it was a little more visceral. Get some horniness into those dreams, and a little horror too, maybe, or a more adult take on the whole idea, generally. Made me really appreciate that Simplicity and Other Jay & Eve didn't shy away from sex (and in the case of Simplicity, some very non-pastel dreams about desire and monsters from the id). I mean, there's nothing wrong with Young Adult! Every book its reader! I just thought it was a neat story (it was a neat story, a nice satisfying plot) and I would have liked it if it was catering a little bit more to me. :)

ETA: Also I'm fascinated by the way Song and Bedfellows and Flip all use climactic or major-turning-point dance sequences to convey intimacy and joyous catharsis. Something about how the silence and stillness of the comics page leaves a big space for the reader to "complete the scene" filling in the implied music and motion thus heightening the emotional impact from that reader investment, I don't know.

A Garden of Spheres, Linnea Sterte, 2025 graphic. I read maybe 100-120 pages of this and it was very pretty but I had no idea what was going on and I felt disconnected rather than intrigued. I don't mind slow and I don't mind having to work a little but I think I need a little more of a thread to follow. :/

Flip, Ngozi Ukazu, 2025 graphic novel. I started this once and didn't get very far but I started it again and I guess just had to be in the right mood because I was really into it. A body-swap story about a Nigerian-American scholarship girl at a ritzy private school with a crush on a rich white boy. Ukazu does great work with her expressive, appealing faces (she's the author of Check Please, and it's neat to see her bringing the style and skills she developed there to this new project) and tells a solid story with some funny and touching moments. Are we going to get this onto the Hugo ballot? Probably not, but is it way better than at least half the likely ballot? Heck yeah.