Hi! I Saw You Were Taking Art Requests About The Will Of The Many, So Hear Me Out: Vis Falling From The

Hungerstone || Kat Dunn ★★☆☆☆ Started: 24.02.2025 Finished: 14.03.2025 Thank you to NetGalley and Zando for providing me with an ARC and giving me the opportunity to share my honest review. "Hungerstone" is, ostensibly, a very well-researched and painstakingly crafted novel, that unfortunately amounts to very little. Yes, the clothing and the cuisine described are era-appropriate, but they only make the novel tedious, at times even dull. By contrast, the characters seem to have been afforded less thought - the husband is a painfully one-dimensional caricature of a robber baron, the Carmilla of Dunn is nowhere near as eloquent as Le Fanu's, oftentimes she is simply rude to the point you can't understand how anyone could find her alluring, and the protagonist, Lenore, flounders through the pages, puppeteered, at different times, by her husband and then by Carmilla. She psychoanalyzes herself like a modern woman, unequivocally finding the roots of her problems in her traumatic childhood, and yet does nothing with that insight until Carmilla prods her into action. There is a lot of telling instead of showing, a lot of unambiguous hammering of the author's ideas that makes for a mostly unpleasant reading experience - the reader is not allowed to draw their own conclusions at any point, everything is conveniently spelled out on the page. In short, "Hungerstone", much like "Our Hideous Progeny", is a lukewarm (at best) retelling of a much more competent, enticing, exciting novel, interspersed with poorly planted 21st century feminism, that ends up being a mind-numbingly tedious experience. I can recognize the effort that went into this work, but just because something takes a lot of time and research, doesn't mean it's good.

Indigo || Chi-Ho Kwong, Chi-Kit Kwong ★★★☆☆ Started: 19.02.2025 Finished: 19.02.2025 Thank you to NetGalley, Mad Cave Studios and Nakama Press for providing me with an ARC and giving me the opportunity to share my honest review. "Indigo" follows the story of Ella Summer, a reporter at a magazine that chases urban legends and conspiracy theories; with the suspicious death of her university professor, Ella's life is suddenly turned upside down, as things she thought were outlandish turn out to be very real after all. If you're interested in conspiracy theories, this graphic novel is perfect for you. The story is very fast-paced and action-packed, occasionally bordering on being a bit confusing. There is some build-up towards the big reveal, however I think it would have been better if we had been kept in suspense a little while longer. Ultimately, the plot felt rushed, and it's because of that that I can't give "Indigo" a higher rating. That, and the fact that it leans quite heavily into a particularly outlandish conspiracy theory that I personally don't buy. On the flip side, the art is magnificent. The first few pages are in full color, and the artwork is simply dreamy, and the art style translates really well into the black-and-white pages of the story proper.

Blood Over Bright Haven || M.L. Wang ★★★★★ Started: 01.02.2025 Finished: 08.02.2025 An orphan since the age of four, Sciona has always had more to prove than her fellow students. For twenty years, she has devoted every waking moment to the study of magic, fueled by a mad desire to achieve the impossible: to be the first woman ever admitted to the High Magistry. When she finally claws her way up the ranks to become a highmage, however, she finds that her challenges have just begun. Her new colleagues will stop at nothing to let her know she is unwelcome, beginning with giving her a janitor instead of a qualified lab assistant. What neither Sciona nor her peers realize is that her taciturn assistant was once more than a janitor; before he mopped floors for the mages, Thomil was a nomadic hunter from beyond Tiran’s magical barrier. Ten years have passed since he survived the perilous crossing that killed his family. But working for a highmage, he sees the opportunity to finally understand the forces that decimated his tribe, drove him from his homeland, and keep the Tiranish in power. Through their fractious relationship, mage and outsider uncover an ancient secret that could change the course of magic forever—if it doesn’t get them killed first. Sciona has defined her life by the pursuit of truth, but how much is one truth worth with the fate of civilization in the balance? Reading this line in the book description: “Magic has made the city of Tiran an industrial utopia, but magic has a cost—and the collectors have come calling.”, I thought the Bright Haven would come under an external threat that would have to be alleviated. What really happens is much more insidious, much more sinister, and much harder to combat, let alone overcome. The result is an exceptional standalone fantasy novel in the vein of R.F. Kuang's Babel.

Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth || Natalie Haynes ★★☆☆☆ Started: 03.03.2025 Finished: 09.03.2025 Curiositas vincit omnia After being left thoroughly underwhelmed by Haynes's previous book, "Stone Blind", I wasn't all too willing to pick up "Divine Might". Unfortunately, my curiosity won, and I cracked it open, and had it not been for the flicker of hope this book gave me at the end of the first chapter with the paragraph about Sappho, I would not have finished it - I was hoping for similar insights about the other characters discussed in the book, and I got none. The narrative is very disjointed - Haynes has inundated her chapters with jokes that more often miss than hit, and with semi-fitting but ultimately uninteresting and dragging references to movies that are at best tangentially connected to the goddesses she writes about. There is a marked downgrade from "Pandora's Jar" - the discussion is nowhere near in depth or engaging. It's unfortunate to see an author's writing get worse and worse with every published book - I'm afraid this is the case with Natalie Haynes. It's hard to believe she was intrinsically motivated or inspired to write this book at all. In the chapter about Hestia (one of the weakest in the book, that tells very little, if anything, about the goddess), she admits to the following: "There comes a time in every author's life when she has to accept that she may not have made the absolute best possible decision. And the day when I blithely promised 10,000 words on a goddess who is barely mentioned in any ancient source, who makes no dent on the Renaissance? That may turn out to have been just such a time." Then why choose this particular goddess? Greek Mythology isn't lacking in goddesses, so why allocate that much literary real estate to a goddess you don't have much at all to say about? "Divine Might", while nowhere near as egregiously bad as "Stone Blind", was a frustrating read nonetheless - there are interesting points in there, but they are far too few and far in between to make this novel worth your time.

Do you lay bread on your tongue and think of me [...] do you swallow it like a sacrament, do you still get down on your knees?

Sophie Mackintosh, from 'Cursed Bread'

A Certain Hunger || Chelsea G. Summers ★★★★☆ Started: 21.12.2024 Finished: 28.12.2024 Food critic Dorothy Daniels loves what she does. Discerning, meticulous, and very, very smart, Dorothy’s clear mastery of the culinary arts make it likely that she could, on any given night, whip up a more inspired dish than any one of the chefs she writes about. Dorothy loves sex as much as she loves food, and while she has struggled to find a long-term partner that can keep up with her, she makes the best of her single life, frequently traveling from Manhattan to Italy for a taste of both. But there is something within Dorothy that’s different from everyone else, and having suppressed it long enough, she starts to embrace what makes Dorothy uniquely, terrifyingly herself. Recounting her life from a seemingly idyllic farm-to-table childhood, the heights of her career, to the moment she plunges an ice pick into a man's neck on Fire Island, Dorothy Daniels show us what happens when a woman finally embraces her superiority. A satire of early foodieism, a critique of how gender is defined, and a showcase of virtuoso storytelling, Chelsea G. Summers’s A Certain Hunger introduces us to the food world’s most charming psychopath and an exciting new voice in fiction.

We || Yevgeny Zamyatin ★★★★★ Started: 22.02.2025 Finished: 23.02.2025 Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel. In the totalitarian society of the OneState of the great Benefactor, in a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, is a world where people are numbers, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life has been reduced to a mathematical perfectly balanced equation, an ongoing process of mathematical precision. Free will is a disease. Primitive passions, instincts, and creativity have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier, and whatever alien species are to be found there, will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason. One number, D-503, chief architect of the Integral, decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful 1-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State… the discovery, or rediscovery, of inner space, and that disease the ancients called the soul, and Love. If you are interested in dystopian literature in the vein of Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, We is a must read!

The River Has Roots || Amal El-Mohtar ★★★★★ Started: 22.05.2025 Finished: 01.06.2025 In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family. There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees. But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk…

Book Lovers || Emily Henry ★★★★☆ Started: 09.02.2025 Finished: 12.02.2025 Nora Stephens’ life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby. Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute. If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves. As someone who hardly ever picks up a romance novel, I had a really good time with Book Lovers, despite being a narrow-eyed sceptic at first. The humorous banter between the main characters was a real highlight, as was the subversion of your run-of-the-mill Hallmark movie plotlines. Sometimes an overachieving workaholic can just be that, without converting to the Small Town Ways, and that's ok! And even though, for the most part, I could see where the novel was going, I still really enjoyed the experience.