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What'cha Reading?

Finished The Subtle Art of Folding Space by John Chu on my way home today. Unfortunately this one fell flat for me. It has a great premise and some really cool ideas, but there's no character development and a lot of the plot and worldbuilding felt very hand-wavey. Most of the major plot points are resolved via dei ex machina and yet somehow there were still a bunch of loose ends leftover. It seemed like the author was halfheartedly trying to set up for a sequel in the book's final pages. I get that it's his first novel and he probably had no idea if he'd get to write a second, but it was too non-committal about it to really get me to care, and as a result the whole ending felt pretty unsatisfying.
 
As Mothra's 2026 Book Backlog Project continues apace, I have finally gotten around to reading I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. Here's my review.

This is a book I kinda wish I'd read growing up, because it is simply a much better version of the many, many similar post-apocalyptic stories we've seen in the 70 years since. Stories that have come far short of evoking the despair of being the last man on Earth, the hollowing absence of purpose that waits at the end of each day survived. Like Tiger! Tiger!, this is an instance of the thing that inspired a genre doing it masterfully the first time.

I went into this with pretty tame expectations. The various adaptations have had good ideas here and there but ultimately blah stories and no real character work. I'm generally a Will Smith enjoyer and he did manage to capture the manic aspect of Neville a little bit, with the mannequins and the wry ramblings to himself, but well, the movie just doesn't revel in the nothingness like Matheson's Neville does, lacking the courage to haunt him and torment him and consume him. The Neville we meet in the book has already been broken, simply staying alive out of nothing more than a fear of death and this nagging thread of curiosity that he comes to hold on to for dear life. For much of the book, it would be so much easier to just let himself die, but he can't, and he hates himself for this.

I was not expecting how moving Matheson's writing would be. You feel the anger and the despair and the listlessness and the breaks of hope, you see these plumes of self-hatred erupt when one little thing is reasonably forgotten and he feels the terror once again, having allowed it back in to claw at him. One of my favorite moments of the book is when he spends too long in a building without windows and doesn't realize how late its become, recklessly pushing his station wagon to the limit as he catastrophizes, knowing he's too late, that the creatures will be waiting for him.

It's also kind of funny in a way that worked for me, simply because it was believably a moment of play that he allowed himself in facing the absurdity. Neville just vamping to himself, doing bits to nobody, amusing himself and becoming tickled by an idea voiced to nobody, it's shit we've all done in the car or in some place where we cannot be heard. Very authentic. When the despair compounds and he starts being frayed apart, well, it's really gripping stuff. I love seeing this dude tormented!!!

Also need to give props to Robertson Dean as the VA for the audiobook. One of the most impressive performances I've heard yet, it fit the tone of the character perfectly. I found this video that inexplicably has the whole thing up, I assume not for terribly long, but gives a sense of how he does the reading. After the conclusion of I Am Legend a comically different, overall fairly ridiculous guy takes over for the readings of Matheson's short stories, and it's hard to separate the two but I generally didn't care much for his short stories.
 
Mothra said:
Pretty good! I’m glad I read it. Here's my review of the book.

I did not necessarily enjoy reading this book but I’m happy I ate my vegetables with this one because there was a whole lot about the origins of many staple American foods, grains, greens, meats, and so on that I didn’t know the first thing about.

I started reading it because a friend had recommended it when I asked about books that talk about the act of cooking itself - like of preparing, cooking, and presenting the food as a “creative” act, in the moment of making it into a meal - and it is absolutely not about that at all, so, I had to sort of give up on that expectation early and let the story take me where it wanted.

It is largely about how soul food, southern cooking, black cooking, all cannot possibly be separated from the history of slavery and forced labor on which the nation was built, and it’s real interesting seeing the origins of a lot of dishes we consider traditionally American. Things like how French cooking would be taught to enslaved chefs so they could cook those things for the plantation owner, and how those cooks would then pass on that knowledge through their family, adding French affects to the unique meats, greens, grains, and beans of America.

A lot of it is about the institution of slavery and the unimaginable suffering brought upon the enslaved, the countless angles of horror to it all, and the utter indifference shown by their keepers. Through this nightmare, cooking and eating were often the merciful moments, these snatched-away pleasures black communities made the most of.

So yeah I didn’t get what I was after but it was a good book!

A few friends helpfully suggested that some cookbooks might be closer to the act of creation itself than the narrative books on cooking - Hetty Lui McKinnon, Asako Yuzuki, Samin Nosrat, authors in that vein.
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Been watching some of Twitty's video appearances and I'm struck by how much more effectively his ideas come across with his physicality and his unguarded moments, in projecting that stone seriousness and that joy, just a better fit than the book. I think this might be why the book ended up listing information, in being this chronicle of facts he'd uncovered as he dug, a lot more than speaking about it or weaving it into any sort of narrative.

These two in particular were great:
 
Mothra said:
Been watching some of Twitty's video appearances and I'm struck by how much more effectively his ideas come across with his physicality and his unguarded moments, in projecting that stone seriousness and that joy, just a better fit than the book. I think this might be why the book ended up listing information, in being this chronicle of facts he'd uncovered as he dug, a lot more than speaking about it or weaving it into any sort of narrative.

These two in particular were great:
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Agreed, this makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the links!

The line "Where'd they get you from? Boston? Toronto?" in the Vice link is the darkest fuckin humor I love it. Really good interview and interesting how much he pushes him out of his comfort zone.
 
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lincolnic said:
You might like The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, which is a more fleshed-out and grounded kind of time travel story.
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You were right! I really enjoyed The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, after being underwhelmed by the unearned romance in This is How You Lose the Time War, this put in the time and talk to make the pairing work. Here's my review.

A very pleasant romance with just enough to say about history, imperialism, and the immigrant experience to keep me engaged all the way through. It's pretty dire that this is my metric now but: Characters actually talked to each other, they spent time together, they'd have undramatic moments, moments of vulnerability and moments of the mundane. It earned the romance!

I think weaving in the trauma of the expats with the trauma of the modern immigrant was a very affecting angle to take, that push and pull between assimilation and identity, feeling that betrayal of one's past in adopting to the present. What you need to give up to survive, and how slowly that happens, such that you don't even notice. For me, this was the meat of the connection between the protagonist and her love interest, clearly where the author was drawing from personal experience and thus, had something to say.

Kaliane Bradley's writing style is great. It's evocative, it's often funny without feeling artificial, it conveys the personality of a variety of characters while keeping them distinct. So many stories like this stumble in trying to be sardonic or to entertain, but this felt like her entertaining herself, and it worked.

There are some gripes. I put most of them in the review but yeah, the main character isn't super interesting. She's another person that things happen to, she wants to return to normalcy, and though this anxiety not to stand our or confront the status quo is a theme, it's still underwhelming in the sense of her being one half of the pairing and being the boring half.

Of course, the author watched The Terror during lockdown (as noted at the end of the book) and wrote a self-insert to date Tom Weston-Jones, which, can't blame her! I like the self-indulgence! I think she elevated that idea a lot with the immigrant and refugee elements, and I think she kept aflame the heat of that wish-fulfillment premise of dating a witty, charming British officer, while gracefully dealing with all the baggage that comes with that. A worse story would've lost the flame, or contrived the premise too far, but she sailed that passage nicely without getting stuck in the ice.

Definitely going to keep my eyes peeled for her next novel.
 
Wow, I have been slacking all. Sorry about that. Here's what the rest of my May was like:
The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett
The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett
Barnum: An American Life by Robert Wilson
Gerald’s Game by Stephen King 5/24 - 5/25
This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews 5/26 - 5/31
The Breathing Method by Stephen King 5/30 - 5/31

This Kingdom was my favorite book this month, and it's my new frontrunner for BOTY
 
Last week, Kylie and I were in line to enter Hurricane Ridge and I was looking for things to do on my phone that didn't use the internet because our car was moving through a WiFi dead zone. It was then that I discovered that I'd purchased Chained Flame by Saffron Drake. It's over 450 pages and I finished it in a day. My only criticism is that the ending feels a bit abrupt, but other than that, I think it's wonderful.

It's a story about a dragon named Lindír, born and raised by humans and kept captive in a dungeon. They escape captivity and go on to try and live a life away from their human family, surviving battles against knights, subterranean horrors, other dragons, even war, and they learn a lot about themself in the process, often at great cost.

Make no mistake, this book is a tragedy. Lindír is entirely too naive and traumatized to appreciate the good in their life until they've abandoned it. But it's kind of a beautiful tragedy, if that makes sense, and I'm glad I read it. Highly recommend.
 
Reading Bite by Bite by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, a collection of essays about food. But also about family, friends and identity. Also really beautiful art of each plant that is the focus of a chapter.
 
Got through The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi at 2x speed, simply to have it read and back on the shelf. I got a copy of this ages ago and never read it, and well, as I knew it would after having suffered through Redshirts, it was really underwhelming. Here's my review.

I'll put my review/rant below the cut here since it's maybe a bit of a bummer:

There's some interesting world-building here and there with the genetic engineering, the social engineering, and the transhumanist elements (looking at you, space borne gamera rock soldiers), but these are just told to you in long, dull infodumps, and rarely mean anything. Everyone in the Ghost Brigades is mind-linked and is never alone and this is just not really explored much, despite it presumably being THE thing you would revolve this story around. This squad of child clone soldiers are made to do these horrible war crimes but it's always presented as a "necessary" thing to ensure humanity's survival. Them force-sterilizing an alien infant with nanobots and then killing her on a call with her father - after having made him commit to attacking his ally instead - is presented as a tough but ultimately just act to prevent their destroying humanity.

The arc of the book is extremely centrist-brained where your superiors know best for you, should never be questioned (because you don't "have all the information"), and the worst thing anyone could do is try to change the status quo. The world they live in is considered the best possible situation for humanity's survival, and there isn't really any cost too high for that, so nobody feels any way about the continuing evils they must perpetuate. They just make wry jokes about it, in the voice that is John Scalzi's because everybody thinks and talks in the same voice.

The plot is a sort of Killmonger situation where the villain is completely right but he "does it wrong" and his plan randomly involves genocide, so they have to kill him and maintain the dire status quo, because that's what it means to be a soldier apparently. I honestly would be here for any of this if the book had something to say about it, if it wanted you to despair at the situation, or to be angry about it, but the vibe is that everything is under control, you need to trust your leaders, and you need to not obsess over the war crimes. I could even endure that if the military scifi action was good, but it's written like this is a TV screenplay, with zero attempt made to put you in that place, and feel what the characters feel.

Blah. I'm of course done with Scalzi but I did get this book read and back on the shelf. I will consume the remainder of OMW in the manner it was intended: By skimming the plot summaries for the next four books and then forgetting them days later.
 
Finished Speaks the Nightbird by Robert McCammon. This was technically a reread for me. I had bought the two mass markets (for those not in the know, for the MMP, they split the story in two, which is ridiculous because I owned a single volume of Swan Song which was longer, plus other MMPs which are way longer that are one volume). Anyway, this was my first time reading it as a single volume, and I enjoyed it somewhat less this time around, sad to say. Thought it could've been 100 pages shorter, and Matthew's inquisitiveness bugged me at times. I'll still, at least, read the next book in the series, maybe before the year is done
 
Finished reading The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang, enjoyed it way more than I expected. It's been a long time since I've read a halfway decent war story, and appreciated how much real shit was put into this story. Here's my review.

A good amount of this book is about the main character, Rin, a war orphan with darker-than-average skin, fighting tooth and nail to stay one step ahead of the death and rape and poverty that waits to consume her if she submits herself to it as a person the state considers undesirable in color, gender, and class. She never really slows from this dead sprint, pulling on every tiny advantage she can scrounge up to get the next opportunity, and ride it to the next, and the next.

By the time you're at the war college, she's afforded a single choice in the form of her area of study, which leads to a pretty cool illustration of magic in this setting. To be honest, I did not know this book had any supernatural shit going in, and the book sort of plays with that, with Rin believing the world as the state has presented it, purged of anything that might be embarrassing, with even the definitely true reframed and reinterpreted in their favor. When she learns the nature of the gods and of magic, it's this elemental force of cosmic wills, like hunger or cold or rage, things that humans may choose to submit themselves to and act as a conduit for. I really liked how the book reveals how little control humans have over this force, how clumsy they are entering this new understanding of reality.

The war story I think was honest, the reasons for war are as mundane and idiotic as real wars often are, just the continued desire of nations and individuals for power, deserved for arbitrary reasons they invent. This leads into a fun little Suicide Squad type of setup for a bit where they do missions, and she witnesses the horrors of these god-entities. We then get a number of chapters on them enduring and committing war crimes, most of it drawn on the Second Sino-Japanese War. I did find the Japan stand-in, the Federation of Mugen, to be kind of cartoonishly evil, but a lot of it was drawing on the Rape of Nanking and like... all of that did happen, men are capable of and have done these evils. It's telling that the atrocities committed there are so dire I considered them unrealistic in the book until confirming they were based on real events.

I plan on checking out the next book in the series, something I definitely didn't think I was going to do when I started this one. I also consider myself a fan of R. F. Kuang now and am going to check out her other big novels. This was a fun nightmare!
 
Are they divisive because they touch on Chinese culture stuff? Because her parents being from there and her general good level of research made me feel pretty confident she wasn't making up too much about cultural norms of the time.

I always have my guard up a little with stuff involving the Second Sino-Japanese War because there's so much anger and resentment from it that it's really had to get any kind of narrative written by someone who cares that doesn't paint the other side as mindless ghouls. And like, that kind of thing is really understandable given what happened, but obviously the real world isn't quite that simple. One thing I liked about The Poppy War was that it showed in many ways the desire for power and land and entitlement that leads to wars, again and again, throughout history. They aren't easily fit into a heroic narrative, they're much more political and usually rooted in some extremely out-of-touch leader surrounded by sycophants leading to a horrible imbalance that flows over.
 
Also for example Babel is long and kind of overcomplicated and people have very mixed feelings whether it is worth the effort or not
 
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The library had a number of comics on display and a manga I hadn't heard of caught my eye, The Solitary Gourmet. The note on the back is "the book in which nothing happens but everything is consumed". I've started reading it and liking it so far, peaceful and mundane in a good relaxing way. It definitely has some older sensibilities about women, I checked and some of the stories are from the 90s so 90s Japan matches up with that. Nothing too bad so far though, just odd/awkward statements.
 
Now, for new to me King, I finished Rose Madder, and it was a big ball of meh. Did not need to be almost 600 pages long, maybe 400. Norman was a good villain, and the stuff with the painting world was unique. Other than that, low on the totem pole for me for Stephen King books, and probably my least favorite book so far this year
 
Violentvixen said:
The library had a number of comics on display and a manga I hadn't heard of caught my eye, The Solitary Gourmet. The note on the back is "the book in which nothing happens but everything is consumed". I've started reading it and liking it so far, peaceful and mundane in a good relaxing way. It definitely has some older sensibilities about women, I checked and some of the stories are from the 90s so 90s Japan matches up with that. Nothing too bad so far though, just odd/awkward statements.
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Solitary Gourmet also has a phenomenally delightful show that's been running for 12 years and just started showing up on Youtube and the lead actor also hosts my current absolute favorite show on netflix, K-foodie Meets J-Foodie
 
Started reading Strange Pictures by Uketsu. I'm not a fan of horror so had been ignoring this book for a while, but I've seen it recommended many places and that it's atypical horror and might be something I'm fine with. I'm just starting chapter three now and very curious what's going on.
 
Finished the novelization of Star Wars: A New Hope by George Lucas. Pretty much it's what you see in the movie, plus the deleted scenes (you get interactions with Luke and Biggs). The Death Star trench run was exciting reading. Also, finished The Wind Runner by pirateaba. Probably my second to least favorite entry in The Wandering Inn, but still very good
 
Three more down! One was 54 pages, one was 288 pages, and one was 336 pages, generally enjoyed them all for very different reasons.

The first was Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett, which I absolutely loved to death. This was an extremely pleasant, funny, interesting, adorable read. Here's my review.

I think one thing I particularly liked here was how Emily is a true professional about a field of study heavily inclined to the same mythologizing and exaggeration as their subjects, the Fae. It often defies the idea that one might simply catalogue every encounter and figure out the rules the Fae live and operate by, these instead being a starting place for the next experiment, the next tiny bit you might learn. There is some creative interpretation she affords herself, but really dislikes the leaps of fancy her contemporaries make. You definitely also get the sense she's like a pig in shit out there stomping about the woods doing research, often thoughtless of her own safety. Also very much appreciated her light touch, never destructive, always respectful of her "subjects", always ready to put aside her passion for the sake of decency or distress.

Emily's discomfort with social situations I found very cute, her cataloging the rules of human interaction in the same way she does the Fae, paying it a sort of academic interest. When Wendell arrives, he's a much better foil for her than I expected, so full of himself and so used to beaming his charms around that it frustrates and fascinates himself to find Emily only paying them mind when he seems to need her acknowledgement. Adorable stuff.

One thing that made This is How You Lose the Time War not really work for me is that you simply never saw why those two were madly in love, what they wanted from each other, what they got, what there was to find and tantalize them, or even where the simple comforts were. So I greatly appreciated *Emily Wilde* taking a very slow approach here in showing their fumbling friendship piece itself together, often frustrating each other, often a complete baffling mystery to the other, until they formed a common language and way of bartering. I really enjoyed the detail that Emily had long deduced that Wendell was a sort of Fae in disguise years ago, and she does not hide this knowledge from him. It sidesteps what would normally be a pretty tedious and formulaic dynamic, and cuts to a point where they must engage with each other as they are, and as equals. So yeah, the romance worked! It never feels artificially accelerated by the needs of the plot, still quite chaste by the end of the book, simply because that is the reasonable amount of time Emily would need to consider such a thing.

The handling of the Fae world was well-done by my limited awareness of the genre. I love how, though there are many odd rules in their culture, there are big overarching themes Emily uses as guide posts: stories must never conclude, stories must always allow for their continuation, things are never given or taken but bartered, mystery and occlusion is important. This makes their culture and way of dealing distinctly different from humans, with their aims different, and their interests in reality different, making it very much the case that we cannot extend our expectations and cultural norms to their realm. It makes the subject of study here quite interesting, which makes it clear why Emily is so enamored with them, and makes the portions of the book in which she researches and deals as enjoyable as the romance cuteness.

Definitely going to continue with this series, I had a great time.

The second read was What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson. Here's my review.

This one I picked out of curiosity after really enjoying I Am Legend. How would this motherfucker tackle something as esoteric as the afterlife? I typically wouldn't have an interest, but he's a good writer, he loves giving detail, I thought it might possibly be interesting. I wasssssss largely right, but it was close to becoming unsalvagably buried underneath this man's New Age headcanon.

This is a man raised as a Christian Scientist, trying to reconcile his analytical mind with his faith by using New Age concepts to construct what he described as 'his own religion.' It oscillates between cool sci-fi concepts akin to what you'd find in The Matrix or a similar virtual realm, and outlandish spiritual concepts like silver cords of various lengths connecting you to each realm. The bulk of the book is an Asimov-style affair where the main character is in a room with someone who knows all the answers, and he asks question after question about the premise of his book, and the other person answers them. Truly chapter after chapter of this, of learning how this entire realm works. I would sometimes think about Pantheon a bit, how their life is within a purely virtual realm, where the limits of creation are in creativity alone.

This is a level of commitment to world-building I really admire. He lays out everything as it must be for his vision of the afterlife to make sense, and he fucking leaves nothing on the cutting room floor, this feels like what he actually thinks is real, which makes it pretty charming in the sense that he's not going to put anything in here he doesn't think makes sense. It is also sometimes quite absurd, I've put an excerpt in the block below that'll give you a sense of what I mean.

I honestly very much enjoyed his "scientist" half being driven by curiosity, of learning, and envisioning the ideal afterlife as another realm with nobody in charge, which we all must learn about, and experiment and theorize, and write about. All the things we do in our world continue in the next, but we're free of hunger and pain and survival, we're thought, allowed to explore creation to our heart's content. I really love that all that is known is only what is known by those who live there now, and they still have projects they work on, and fields of science they continue to explore. It at times hews a little into "you should be productive even after your death" territory but honestly, nobody is judged harshly for not "contributing", though it is implied to be something they judge others on a little.

The plot plot of the book doesn't kick in until a little over halfway through, when his wife's suicide leaves her in the "lower realms" that equate to the underworld, a place where people are their own tormentors, believing themselves deserving of suffering for absolution. This is an idea I liked a lot from Lucifer, the notion that hell has no tormentor in charge, it is us unable to forgive ourselves, wandering in repetition of our failures, these things we feel we must suffer for. Escape only comes with the forgiveness of one's self. I quite liked the premise here of Chris doing an Orpheus and Eurydice to journey from heaven into hell, to find her and guide her to forgiveness.

It only lasts for about 20% of this book, but everything with Chris finding his wife and just staying with her, sitting in the darkness with her, talking to her, building that hope from nothing again, I loved that a lot. That was the juice. That's what this entire thing should've been about the whole time. For me, this whole stretch made the book worth reading, delivered with the same kind of unguarded vulnerability I liked in I Am Legend, it really was heart-felt. I was sad to leave this portion when we did, because he's really talented at the psychological toll of horror.

But, well, it was back to learning about how, mechanically, reincarnation fits into the soul-mate system, and how multiple people can queue up to return to life as a specific baby but a cosmic computer determines who is most worth yadda yadda, that way till the book's over. He cannot help himself, which has its charms, but definitely is not to the benefit of the story.

In this scene, the main character acts a woman he encounters in the afterlife questions about the 'aura' he saw radiating off of his friend Albert. Albert was also wearing glorious robes.

"Albert must be quite advanced." I said.

"He is!" She replied, "I'm sure you've noticed his robe and aura."

Alright, I told myself. Ask questions. Start learning.

"I'm curious about the aura. Can you tell me something about it? For instance, does it exist in life?"

"For those who can see it." She told me, "It signifies the presence of the etheric double in the spirit body. The etheric double exists within the physical body until death. And the spirit body exists within the etheric double until the *second* death, each possessing its own silver cord.

The cord connecting the physical body to etheric double is the thickest, that connecting the etheric double to the spirit body about an inch in diameter. A third cord, thin as spider's web, connects the spirit body to, well, I'm not sure Robert. Pure spirit I imagine." She said, "And incidentally, the reason I know about the aura is that it's part of my field of study here."

"You don't suppose Albert just might have had the idea I might be asking just such a question, do you?" I asked.

Her returned smile was my answer. She continued, telling that me the aura of the etheric double extends an inch or two beyond the limits of the physical body. The aura of the spirit body up to several feet beyond the limits of the etheric double, taking on more luminosity the further it is from the dimming effect of the body.

She told me auras all look different, the range of colors unlimited. People unable to think of anything beyond material sensation have auras that are red to brown, the lower their concepts, the darker their colors. The auras of unhappy souls emit a deep, depressing green. A lavender radiation means that the person is acquiring a more spiritual consciousness. Pale yellow indicates the individual is sad, and has a longing for lost Earth life.

"No doubt that is what mine looks like." I told her. When she didn't reply, I smiled.

"I know," I said. I am going to be positive, I vowed. Let there be an end to despair.
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The third read was Squeak by Vera Valentine, a book I picked up on a lark at the used book store near me. It was unfortunately very bland and predictable, but it did really take me by surprise at the 90% mark in a fairly Jokerfying way. Bad book, glad I read it, had fun. Here’s my review.

Pearl-clutchers do not read further it gets pretty PG-13!!! You have been warned:

When I was at the used book store near me last I thumbed through the frankly massive section of the store that are steamy bodice-ripper romances aimed at heterino women. Kinda like the massive popularity of true-murder podcasts, they’re not necessarily something I enjoy but I’m really curious what the target audience is looking to get out of them. They’re *so* popular. Surely, a little danger, a little coziness, the feeling of being chosen, nothing too elaborate.

As I held Squeak in my hand in the store I pondered, would it be some kind of tf kink story? Was tf and monsterfucking now a mainstream thing you’d find on a store shelf? Or would it be a bog-standard two-guys-one-gal setup with maybe some kind of circus/faire theming going on? Would there be clowns? Would she fuck a clown? Would the clown’s penis be an inflatable balloon? Would it be like a demon IT clown? Is there a desire in the general populace to fuck a clown man? *I* would like to fuck a clown *woman*, so surely the reverse is true?

When I see something like this on the various fanfic communities I’m in, it’s typically worth a look because the author will have some outlandish fetish that they'll bring to life by putting ten thousand pretty evocative words down. Certainly, if Valentine wants to fuck a balloon or a clown, this book is going to be rolling up its sleeves and gettin' up in them clown guts, right?

Sadly, no, what I held in my hand here was cowardice.

Squeak starts with Poppy, an art student who draws people on the campus of her school. Now the name Poppy might make you think she's going to (accidently?) detonate one of the balloon boys in this book but I will tell you right now that does not happen sadly, that would have kicked ass. Her being an art student turns out to be not relevant to the plot at all, I have to imagine it is only so because it was a generic quirky profession the author had on-hand to drop in.

She is approached by the kindly himbo Sebastian, a character you've seen in any number of fem-aimed dating sims, one you could maybe liken to Bolin in Korra if you flattened him out a lot. He flirts with Poppy unprompted, flustering her, and they chat about how he works at a candy booth for the nearby circus (?). She mostly rebuffs him but secretly loved it because he's hot. We're then shown Sebastian going back to the Trixie-style folksy trailer home thing in the back of the candy stand, where we meet the brooding Keane, and it is revealed to us that both he and Seb are tuplas, created from balloons by Zora, a witch who worked at a DIFFERENT circus. We literally never see Zora, which I found insane because you might have passable smutty story if it's Zora fucking her two balloon tupla boy toys and all the power-disparity therein, but no, they had successfully fled from her and now live together.

Seb and Keane make out a bunch, but if you think you might be in danger of some kind of intimacy happening here, we are pulled away quickly for the author to explain how the two of them were able to break free of their servant nature by stealing a red book from Zora, and that's what allowed them to show affection for each other rather than just their creator. This odd bit of trivia explained, the author cuts away to the next day, where Keane menaces Poppy a tiny bit (he is jealous of her making a go at his man) but they're soon inexplicably drawn to each other and make out, then fuck in the back room of an art studio. It is here they explain that Keane sometimes makes little balloon squeaky sounds but that only happens like twice ever, and his cock is huge and has a knot on it (!!) which she doesn't really question. When she cums she bites into his collarbone a bit and hears the sound of air escaping but tragically Keane does not explode, which would I think have made this all worth it. Instead, the book takes a turn I could not possibly have expected.

Keane and Poppy return to Seb and Seb turns to the camera and explains that the two are now "paired", meaning that there will be no place for him in this relationship. I began to tilt my head a bit here because Seb goes on to explain how there are 5 days of "nesting" that take place where the Alpha mus- oh okay, THIS IS SECRETLY AN OMEGAVERSE FIC

"Keane... in all your research, didn't you ever think to read the RED book? Once you found out why you and I could... BE... with one another?"

The small read book dealt with sex magic and the dominion Zena had over us. The spells within it wheren't the magic that brought us into being, but they were undeniably the ones she used to bring us to heel.

I looked at Poppy. She was probably scared out of her mind. Bites like that told me that Keane had probably knotted her, which could only mean one thing: She was an actual Tuplamancer, an Omega to our Alpha natures, and more importantly, she was now mated, however unintentionally, to Keane.
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THEY'RE PUBLISHING OMEGAVERSE STORIES NOW AND THEY AIN'T PUTTING THAT ON THE COVER

I read on in stunned silence as they have a honestly pretty unexciting three-way, then go into a haze of fucking each other for like two weeks because they're in heat like werewolves. They don't really explain much about this but in literally the last three pages of the book, in a scene we do not see, Zora returns but is immediately defeated by Poppy because she is an Omega and has powers.

This is my first brush with Omegaverse stuff! I had avoided it until now, sort of rolling my eyes at this Supernatural werewolf thing that escaped containment, but god, I had NO IDEA it had gone this far. Regular-ass non-internet-using sun-gazing Normals are picking up this book off the shelf and reading it. I read up on the (very good) Omegaverse entry on fanlore.org and well, it's largely about contriving a system where women are allowed to be horny and be claimed, because it's out of their hands due to pheromones and their biology, where love at first sight is real and they imprint for life immediately like in Twilight, making their love uncontrollably horny for them and taking out the need to have them talk or anything, and making it built-in to the universe that the main character is the special Omega-class by genetics, who must have an Alpha and will allow by her whim a Beta like Seb to participate. Basically, it has this class structure that tells everyone what they're supposed to do, so the main character doesn't have to voice what she wants, she is just at the mercy of this system.

So, it's absolutely wild this author has published what is clearly an Omegaverse fanfic for some fandom with the names changed around. It's also insanely cowardly because it isn't even about the thing the book purports to be about - balloon-men fucking and being fucked and possibly detonating, resulting in murder(?) - and throws away the only possibly interesting female character (the witch) in favor of a reader self-insert who has no thoughts one way or the other.

I think the main thing that struck me was how clinical this entire system was. There is a moment of passion that is brought on by biological forces out of their control, where they are then put into biologically-created roles of hunter/protector andddd I guess "brood mother" is what I'm gonna say here, and they are locked into this shit for life. THAT'S IT. They don't choose anything! The world set it up for them! It's just soul-mate destiny stuff again! You can have your characters talk to each other and actually like each other, you don't have to make them go mind-blank and pushed into it! So strangely tidy, it's like writing "and then they were fated to be together and loved each other for all time", how insanely boring.

All that said, there was one singular moment of courage in this book: When Sebastian gets sucked off by Keane and it is revealed he cums cake frosting.
 
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I'm reading Anthony Horowitz's Moriarty, which is a Sherlock Holmes novel approved by the Conan Doyle estate. It nails the Holmes vibe pretty well. The point of view character Chase, a Pinkerton agent who is self-admittedly more determined and relentless than clever, is a neat compliment to the traditional Holmesian method of being supernaturally observant (while also being distinct from Watson's usual MO).
 
Finished The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee. Good, but not great. Felt it dragged a bit at spots and thought the ending was semi-clicheish
 
Olli said:
The point of view character Chase, a Pinkerton agent
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Making your main character a member of possibly the most notorious and reviled union busting firm of all time is certainly a choice. (I don't know if this has any bearing on the book, I do find it funny though.)
 
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