Book Review: A WEB OF OBSIDIAN

TITLE: A Web of Obsidian (Obsidian Sisterhood #1)

AUTHOR: Lydia M. Hawke

231 pages, Michem Publishing, ISBN 9781989457290 (print, also e-book)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

I have been a fan of Lydia M. Hawke since the first book in the Grigori Legacy series (when it was originally published under the author’s real name, Linda Poitevin*), so it’s probably not a surprise that I quite enjoyed A Web of Obsidian, her newest urban fantasy series. Although I’m not sure that “urban fantasy” is the totally correct genre label for this series, as the magic the main character encounters turns out to be the result of an ancient alien visitor to Earth … but “urban science fiction” doesn’t have the same ring, and didn’t Arthur C. Clarke say that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? So maybe I’m overthinking the label …

Web is narrated in the first person by Sister Monica Barrett, sixty-nine years old and the holder of two black belts (continuing from the Crone Wars books Hawke’s penchant for centering older women as series leads). Well, former Sister -- Monica left the church years ago but still lives with a group of nuns while running a shelter for women (abused, abandoned, in need of support). Monica is always ready to stand up for her convictions and for the rights of the women she has decided to protect – including an emaciated, nearly dead woman who shows up on the shelter’s front porch pursued by a mysterious man. Sister Monica is beaten almost to death by the man before the nearly dead woman tosses her a smooth, flat stone that reinvigorates Monica and allows her to defeat the woman’s would-be assailant. This plunges Sister Monica into a world of secret societies at odds with each other.

To clear: Sister Monica kicks ass even before she gains mystical abilities she doesn’t understand. She is a psychologically and physically strong female protagonist. While she shares two traits with Claire Emerson, the lead character in Hawke’s Crone Wars series (both are retirement-age women who are at first overwhelmed by the revelation that magic is real and that they have been chosen to wield it), the two are very different in personality and in non-magical physical ability. I mention this because I would hate anyone to think that Web of Obsidian is just a retread of Becoming Crone. The main character, the way the magic system works, the way the story beats play out as Monica slowly discovers what she’s been drawn into, are all quite different. I liked Claire … I would hang out with Sister Monica.

Bear in mind that this is the first book in a new series, so not every question introduced is answered. There are enough reveals to feel satisfied at the end, and enough lingering questions to leave a reader intrigued to read book two. And a couple of twists along the way to keep things interesting. There are also several supporting characters that I’m interested in seeing developed as the series progresses.

*A few years ago, Poitevin decided to start publishing her urban fantasy series under a different name from her romance and romantic suspense books, hence the Grigori Legacy, Crone Wars, and Obsidian Sisterhood series now being issued under the “Lydia M. Hawke” name.

I received an electronic advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. Web of Obsidian releases in print and e-book form on February 25, 2025.

Book Review: OUR SHARE OF NIGHT

TITLE: Our Share of Night

AUTHOR: Mariana Enriquez   TRANSLATOR: Megan McDowell

588 pages, Hogarth Books, ISBN 9780451495150 (paperback; also hardcover, e-book, audio)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night, translated into English by Megan McDowell, is not an easy book to read. It is close to 600 pages of dense emotive language, shifts in point-of-view, jumps in time, forays into multiple horror sub-genres, history lessons, and a pervading sense of doomed inevitability. But it is a book worth reading and contemplating. I might not have read the book, or at least not now, if it hadn’t been chosen as the January selection for Stanza Books’ Horror Book Club. Weeks after finishing it, scenes are still popping unbidden into my head and the urge to research the 1980s history of Argentina in more detail keeps growing.

Our Share of Night is primarily the story of Juan Peterson and his son Gaspar, who one morning in January 1981 set out on a road trip that will eventually take them to the remote family estate of Juan’s recently deceased wife, Rosario. Rosario’s family is part of a worldwide cult called The Order, and Juan is the Order’s unwilling medium, keeping them in contact with the Darkness they worship and which they believe has promised them immortality of a sort. Juan will do anything to protect his son from being used by the Order – even if it means putting himself, his brother Lius, his best friend Stephen, and his wife’s half-sister Tali in danger. The aftereffects of that initial road trip play out years later, as Juan’s health continues to fail and Gaspar ages into adulthood.

 I say ‘primarily’ because in addition to the large sections of the book told in close third-person from Juan’s and then Gaspar’s POV (with occasional forays into close third from the POVs of various friends and loved ones), there are shorter sections told from other people’s POV: a stream-of-consciousness section from the POV of Juan’s adoptive “father” Doctor Bradford; a short first-person section narrated by a journalist; and a long flashback narrated by the late Rosario. The Doctor Bradford section was the toughest part of the book for me, as stream-of-consciousness is not a form I enjoy, and also one of the more horrific passages as well.

Enriquez smoothly intermixes supernatural/cosmic horror (the scenes with the unknowable Darkness and the way it manifests through Juan),cult horror (The history and machinations of The Order), body horror (very much not easy to read are the passages describing what one of the Order members has done to deform young children), slasher horror (people in a house with a deranged killer), houses that are haunted or connected to supernatural realms (several), medical horror (the AIDS Crisis), generational trauma, and the very real horrors of living under a dictatorship that caused the disappearance of thousands of citizens. I’m hard pressed to think of a sub-genre of horror that isn’t represented in one form or another. There’s even a bit of erotic horror.

The true core of the book is the characters. I can’t say that I particularly like Juan, but I believed, and even admired, his need to protect his son from the horrors that have been inflicted on him. I believed in his need to somehow revenge himself on those who have abused him. I felt for Gaspar even as I yelled at him (yes, I yelled – I didn’t throw the book across the room, but I yelled) for falling into some of the same negative behaviors his exhibited. Enriquez’s handling of this generational inheritance of anger and propensity for physical violence is nuanced and oh so very realistic, as is Gaspar’s awareness that he needs to break the cycle and his struggle to do so. Rosario is equally complex in her love for Juan and her drive to take over (and theoretically change) the Order but at what cost? What, if anything, does she consider unacceptable?

Enriquez also has a lot to say about the perseverance of organizations and orders. She never directly references the legend of the Hydra (cut off one head, and two more grow back) but like that creature, despite generational bulldozing (for lack of a better term), the Order keeps coming back – much like the dictatorships of Argentina (the faces may change; the methodologies of control don’t). And so the horror continues even as the book ends.

As stated earlier, this is not an easy book to read for many reasons. But what it has to say about the history of Argentina, of colonialism, of fanaticism, is too important not to make the effort. It’s not a polemic; it’s not a lecture. It is a fantastic, character driven novel that also holds a mirror up to systems of control (organizational and interpersonal) while also touching on pretty much every type of horror story you can think of.

I’ve had Enriquez’s 2021 short story collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, on my To Be Read bookcase pretty much since it was published, and bought her 2024 collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People, as soon as it came out – both at the recommendation of Mark at Stanza Books in Beacon NY. This novel has convinced me to move both collections up closer to the top of my To Be Read stacks.

Sunday Shorts: SLOW BURN

TITLE: Slow Burn

AUTHOR: Mike Allen

278 pages, Mythic Delirium Books, ISBN 9781956522037 (paperback; also e-book)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Slow Burn, Mike Allen’s latest short story collection, is another tour-de-force mix of body horror, existential dread, and yes, I’ll say it again as I did for his previous collection, mind-fuckery (in the best possible sense of the word). Allen’s stories, even the dark fantasy entries, are grounded in a gritty reality that then veers into increasingly disturbing imagery. Even when his stories start with a sense of dread or an unsettling moment, Allen’s talent for grounding the reader before pulling the rug out from under is on full display.

Allen’s stories are character driven, wherein lies another of his talents: revealing the interiority of a character with sometimes just a sentence or two. Whether the story is set in the small town here-and-now of southwestern Virginia or a fantasy world, the horror is heightened because the characters, or their wants/needs, are recognizable and relatable. The main characters also tend to be common people – middle class or lower – rather than rich or famous, dealing with horrors that encroach on their ability to get a job, keep a job, or get home to a loved one.

In “Falling Is What It Loves,” a daughter tries to come to peace with the complicated relationship she had with her father after his death from cancer with the aid of a supernatural (or possibly alien?) creature called a “roommate.” Is the roommate somehow the main character’s conscience or internal monologue personified? Does every person on Earth have a “roommate”? The story opens up, but does not easily answer, questions about guilt and communication and generational trauma. Generational trauma is also at the core of “The Feather Stitch,” in which a grandmother’s search for her missing grandson leads her to a craft shop with a demonic connection – but generational understanding and familial magic also play their role in a dark story with a (hopefully) hopeful ending.

My two favorite stories in the collection share a theme: how secrets revealed can cause a life, and a person’s sense of self, to fall apart. In “The Butcher, The Baker,” Trukos’ life is simple: kill whoever Auntie Mayya tells him to, in defense of her baking empire. Until the day when Trukos kills someone he wasn’t ordered to and the magic driving him begins to unravel. (Is it spoilery to say this is the darkest take on both the titular fairy tale and “the gingerbread man” that I’ve ever read? Possibly. Sorry.). In “Gherem,” (co-authored with Charles M. Saplak), the titular character, injured in battle, is tasked with carrying an angry witch back to their homeland with the prize that had been battled for before enemy forces catch up to them – but neither Gherem, nor the witch, nor the reason for the battle, are what they at first seem.

The collection also includes horror, or horror-tinged, poems. I feel in no way qualified to review poetry, so all I’ll say is that like the short stories, the poems range from the subtly eerie to full-bore horror.

I love short fiction in all its forms: from novellas to novelettes, short stories, flash fiction, and drabbles. Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it.

Sunday Shorts: Three from Autumn Cthulhu

Editor Mike Davis takes a line from H.P. Lovecraft’s story “Polaris” (“And in the autumn of the year, when the winds from the north curse and whine, and the red-leaved trees of the swamp mutter things to one another in the small hours of the morning under the horned waning moon…”) and uses it as the core principal of the anthology Autumn Cthulhu (Lovecraft ezine Press, 2016). Here are my thoughts on a few of the stories contained therein:

cover image by andreiuc88

“In the Spaces Where You Once Lived” by Damien Angelica Walters

Helena and Jack, a couple in their retirement years, live in a house that backs up onto a beautiful forest. Jack is falling victim to dementia/Alzheimer’s and Helen is struggling to accept the slow loss of her husband and to cope with the changes in his personality. Jack is convinced this house is not his home, that his home is elsewhere: perhaps somewhere in the woods. Walters’ story balances a very real fear (Jack’s health and eventual full loss of memory and cognitive function) with a slow-growing dread that something is very wrong in the woods. Of course, something is, or this wouldn’t be a Lovecraftian story. The relationship between Helena and Jack is drawn so indelibly by Walters, it is easy to see the love that underpins the strangeness and discomfort; scenes with their child and grandchild add to both the poignancy of Jack’s situation and the tension of the mystery of the woods. Helena does eventually learn what’s lurking just out of sight and why it is affecting Jack – but thankfully the author does not use it as an explanation for Jack’s declining mental acuity. That would have been a bit too precious for an otherwise realistic look at the horror of Alzheimer’s and similar diseases.

“The Black Azalea” by Wendy N. Wagner

The protagonist of Wagner’s story is Candace, a recent widow whose marriage to Graham was not a happy one especially in the later years. Before he passed, Graham had planted an azalea bush in the shadow of an elm tree that succumbed to Dutch elm disease, leaving room for sunlight to kill the azalea. The dead azalea blocks Candace’s view of her garden, so she decides on the last nice day of autumn to dig the bush out. Which is when she discovers strange rot at the bush’s core … strange rot that seems to be incredibly contagious to all the other plant life on Candace’s property. And eventually to more than just the plants. Wagner is an expert at moving a story from subtle unease to full out horror, and “The Black Azalea” is yet another example of that skill. The story also does not skimp on characterization in favor of horror; Candace’s life as a widow, and her life before becoming a widow, are just as central to the story as the rot is (and, in fact, I began to consider that this (supernatural? extraterrestrial?) rot is something of a metaphor for the course of Candace and Graham’s marriage.

“A Shadow Passing” by Daniel Mills

“A Shadow Passing” is one of the most fever dream-like short stories I have read in recent memory. A young boy’s mother leaves their house each day, dressed in widow’s black, to track down “them” – winged batlike shadows that speak to her, taunt her, are leading her to something. Something the boy seems tied to, with his strange fevers. Something the boy’s aunts and grandfather don’t seem to want him to be a part of, seeking medical assistance for him while his mother is away. Mills’ prose is perfect for the story’s overall sense of disconnection from logical reality, of a sick child’s inability to understand why the adults in his life seem to be at odds, of the way fevers especially steal time from us and cause us to hallucinate. I might have been reading too much into the story, but it also feels like an investigation of how adults who get caught up in cults will sacrifice everything, potentially even their own children, for the sake of their new beliefs – and how difficult it is for family members outside the cult to save the ones who have been sucked in.

I love short fiction in all its forms: from novellas to novelettes, short stories, flash fiction, and drabbles. Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it.

Sunday Shorts: Two From Women in Practical Armor

In 2016, Ed Greenwood and Gabrielle Harbowy edited Women in Practical Armor, an anthology of fantasy short stories focused on female warriors while avoiding the trope of skimpy armor. Here are my thoughts on a couple of the stories contained therein.

cover image by Nneirda, design by Eloise Knapp

“No Better Armor, No Heavier Burden” by Wunji Lau

Rose, an older woman with a mysterious past, has settled quietly in a small town in the shadow of a mountain with strange properties called the Blacktooth, where weather does not work the way it does in the rest of Ara. Only one person in town knows anything of her past at all, including that she has two estranged adult sons. The story begins with Rose running towards the town Inn because she’s heard there’s trouble, and only upon arrival does she discover one of her sons, Zaian, being held at swordpoint by Leian (a nearby country) soldiers. From there, the story gains complexity as an excellently written fight scene reveals what Rose and her opponents are capable of along with some of Rose’s secrets (and her son’s). But it’s not all non-stop fighting; the conflict between Rose and the people who want to take Zaian in for a crime he possibly didn’t commit also becomes something of a battle of personality and will. I loved Rose’s personality (take charge, take no bullshit, take chances). Her first-person narrative voice is personable and irascible; her relationship with Zaian is not smooth but still loving as she struggles with why he’s been estranged and why he’s lying to her now. The world building surrounding the characters is really great: the Blacktooth is home to weird energy fluctuations that affect not just the weather but the way magic works. I really want to know more about Rose, Zaian, and the countries of Ara and Lei and the religion of the Steersman.

“The Bound Man” by Mary Robinette Kowal

In Li Reiko’s society, women are the warriors and leaders, while men are the homemakers and scribes. Li Reiko herself is a noted leader and warrior, with two young children: a daughter who will someday be a warrior as well, and a son whose interest in martial arts needs to be dissuaded because it distracts him from honing the skills he’ll need to keep the Histories. Despite her society’s dictates, Li Reiko plays a version of hide-and-seek with her kids that fosters both children’s abilities and awareness. Elsewhere, Halldór, a warrior-priest, struggles to bring the sword of the Chooser of the Slain back to his people’s Parliament while his Duke and the rest of the party that found the legendary sword fall to a bandit raiding party. Halldór chants a rune of power that will bring the Chooser of the Slain from the realm of the gods to the world of men … and Li Reiko is torn from her children and thrust into a world she doesn’t recognize. “The Bound Man” explores the ideological conflict of matriarchal versus patriarchal societies alongside the notion of destiny. Li Reiko is stuck living out a legend/prophecy she had no hand in creating, and the story explores the effects of that on her children and on Halldór’s society. There are moments of this story that are so heartbreaking, and Kowal doesn’t give her characters an uncomplicated way out (no rewriting history, for example). The heart of the story is Li Reiko’s relationship with her kids (the hide-and-seek scene is genuinely heartwarming) and Halldór’s unerring belief in the legend of the Chooser of the Slain and her ability to rescue his country from the Troll King.

I love short fiction in all its forms: from novellas to novelettes, short stories, flash fiction, and drabbles. Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it.

Sunday Shorts: Two From UPGRADED

In 2014, after the heart attack that he thankfully survived and which resulted in the installation of a pacemaker, Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke put together Upgraded, an anthology of stories about cyborgs. Here are my thoughts on a couple of the stories contained therein.

cover art by Julie Dillon

“Oil of Angels” by Chen Quifan, translated by Ken Liu

This story starts innocuously enough: our unnamed first-person narrator makes her first visit to a highly recommended, difficult-to-get-an-appointment with, massage therapist named Dr. Qing. The doctor, who is blind, works wonders on the main character’s physical and emotional stress via aromatherapy and unusual massage oils. The therapy starts to peel back the layers of the main character’s trauma and troubled relationship with her mother, which she had buried via a device called a MAD (Memory Assistant Device), a common piece of tech everyone in the narrator’s generation (and the one previous) have installed early in life (meaning pretty much everyone in this world below a certain age is a cyborg, unfamiliar with what life would be like without the MAD). The story becomes a treatise on how technology that seems perfect in the moment of adoption often has hidden downsides, and also a moving example of how generational trauma sneaks insidiously into our interior lives. Liu’s translation of Chen’s story is full of beautiful language and sensory detail that put the reader directly in the massage parlor (soothing) but also directly into the narrator’s memories (decidedly not soothing).

“Honeycomb Girls” by Erin Cashier

The future of Cashier’s story is dystopic, with most men living in the squalor of broken-down cities, scraping to make ends meet, while a lucky few get to live in Towers with access to what few women seem to exist. The main character Geo, more cyborg than human, finds himself in a position to see what life in the Towers is like, but at a cost that becomes increasingly hard to pay. Geo clearly has fewer social skills than any of the people around him, reflected in the language of the story; it’s a close third person POV on Geo, combining the stilted syntax of someone who is awkward socially with in-world jargon the reader has to use context clues to understand (which put me in mind of Anthony Burgess’ novella A Clockwork Orange, although Cashier doesn’t make the reader work as hard as Burgess does to understand what’s being said). Richer people taking advantage of poorer people and men taking advantage of women while infrastructure and society collapse are standard issue dystopia, but Cashier brings moments of real human connection into the mix (between Geo and his closest friends among the junk sellers as well as between Geo and the woman he meets in the Tower) that are truly affecting.

I love short fiction in all its forms: from novellas to novelettes, short stories, flash fiction, and drabbles. Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it.

Book Review: THE CITY IN GLASS

TITLE: The City in Glass

AUTHOR: Nghi Vo

215 pages, TorDotCom, ISBN 9781250348272 (hardcover; also e-book and audio)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Nghi Vo has quickly become one of those handful of authors whose work I will buy without even reading a synopsis about the plot and whose new books I will usually read as soon as I purchase (See also: Seanan McGuire, ‘Nathan Burgoine, Silvia Moreno-Garcia), even if I’m a bit slow when it comes to posting the reviews.

The City in Glass, Vo’s latest novel, is a stunning portrait of responding to grief, recovering from trauma, and finding common ground. The demon Vitrine has been the largely unseen patron of the city of Azril for hundreds of years. Very few of the citizenry know her as more than a legend, and the few that do know she’s real tread a careful path with her. She has loved the city since she first arrived from another continent and has guided it to its current glory. And then a group of angels arrive, declare the city sinful, and destroy it. The angels begin to depart to their higher realm once their “work” is done, but Vitrine manages to curse one of them who then must be left behind. This all happens in the first chapter of the book and is the impetus for the rest of the action, so I’m not really spoiling anything. This first chapter is a master class in how to set a reader up, going from joyful immersion in a new setting to the complete destruction of that setting in a few short pages. Again, since I hadn’t read the front cover flap synopsis, I had no idea what was coming, and I was as devastated as Vitrine.

Vitrine, being immortal, does not have to move on from the ruins of her beloved city to find life and sustenance elsewhere. And so she begins the slow process of watching the land heal and foster new life – and thus, eventually after hundreds of years, a new settlement for her to watch over. We watch Vitrine move through various stages of grief for the loss of not just so many loved ones (both human and animal) but for the mementos and landmarks of the city’s long history. (I cannot help, in retrospect, compare Vitrine’s reactions to what I’ve watched friends in North Carolina go through thanks to last fall’s hurricane, or what I imagine the people of Los Angeles will be going through as they strive to move on from the current fires of winter 2025.) Vitrine cycles through sadness, anger, depression, and excitement for what develops – but Vo makes it clear that these emotions are not compartmentalized or managed on a straight timeline. They overlap, they recur. Setbacks for the city inspire setbacks in Vitrine’s mental and emotional state.

And the presence of the angel she cursed, the being she holds partly responsible (not fully, because the blame lies with the angel’s cohort as well, but they are beyond Vitrine’s reach), does not help her recovery and in fact hinders it for quite some time. Thanks to her curse, the angel is tied to the land that once held Azril and thus is tied to Vitrine. He also goes through a cycle of defiance (that he did anything wrong), regret (at what’s he’s done), and hope (that he can be part of healing the damage to Vitrine’s heart). It is never easy to heal from trauma when the cause of your trauma is still present and a part of your life, and Vo explores that emotional territory beautifully and without attempting to provide any kind of easy “one size fits all” answer to how to navigate the situation.

I also loved the time-lapse “development of a civilization from small settlement to world power” aspect of the book. Vo takes the new city through the stages of agriculture-based to commerce-based and gives it threats domestic, foreign, human, and natural (including a plague). This could have been a much longer, much more detailed novel about the city’s history alone, but viewing the highlights (and low points) of that history through the eyes of an immortal felt more appropriate. This story really is Vitrine’s, and so much can change in the relative blink of an immortal’s eyes.

I cannot recommend The City in Glass highly enough, especially to readers who enjoy deep character studies accompanied by intriguing worldbuilding.

I received an electronic advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. The City in Glass was published in October 2024, so this review is a bit late.

Sunday Shorts: Two from Knaves

In Knaves: A Blackguards Anthology (Outland Entertainment, 2018), Editors Melanie R. Meadors and Alana Joli Abbott brought together 14 stories about anti-heroes, heroes discovering the darker sides of themselves, and villains discovering their nobler aspects. Here are my thoughts on two of the stories contained in an anthology that covers a variety of genres.

cover art by Daniel Rempel

“Daughter of Sorrow” by Maurice Broaddus

“Our kind is never alone.” I really wasn’t sure, thanks to that opening sentence, what genre of story I was in for. “Our kind” meaning … vampires? Clandestine super-humans? Aliens living among us? So many possibilities, and any of them would have been interesting in Broaddus’ hands. What we get is the tale of Rianna, a teenage girl whose family is part of a secret society that runs the world. Rianna’s father is missing and presumed dead, which leaves her adrift and in harm’s way thanks to the society’s rules. Broaddus reveals the danger she’s in through a series of encounters with classmates and doles out the details of her relationship with her father via flashbacks. The alternating scenes build the suspense of both storylines effectively up to the moment they come together. The story is complete unto itself but did leave me wanting more of both Rianna and the Grendel Society.

The Life and Times of Johnny the Fox by Sabrina Vourvoulias

“The Life and Times of Johnny the Fox” is a story about a classic trickster personality, about community, and about doing the right thing even when it’s not the easy thing.

One of the many things I love about this story is what I can only describe as the “street corner urban legend” style of the narration. Imagine walking through a Philadelphia neighborhood, stopping into a bodega for a bottle of water or soda while you’re in the middle of telling your companion a local legend you’ve heard, and having someone say, “I am here to tell you the truth about the Johnny the Fox.” That first sentence sets that tone, and the rest of the story delivers on it.

Every Sabrina Vourvoulias story has an undeniable rhythm, a musicality that drives it. “The Life and Times of Johnny the Fox” is no exception. There’s the beat of the narration, a very particular style of storytelling that sweeps you up and carries you along. But music, singing especially, also plays a part in the main action of the story as Johnny returns to Puerto Rico at a particularly dangerous time for the island, to try to do what he does best: convince someone not to do the terrible thing they’re about to do. But even the most charismatic people stumble sometimes, and how Johnny recovers from that with the help of a community that loves him (even if they don’t always like him) is just as important as whether he succeeds.

2025 Reading Challenges

I always set myself more than one reading challenge per year. Some carry over from year to year, and some are new. Some are broad and some are themed. And in many cases, books read will help me meet more than one challenge. Last year I also started making some formal movie, television, and live theatre viewing challenges.

On the reading side of things, in 2024, I hit my overall book and short story goals and blew past my non-fiction reading sub-goal, but didn’t complete any of the other reading challenges I set myself. On the watching side of things, I exceeded my goal for live theater, but only hit about 70% of my television goal and slightly less than 50% of my movie-watching goal.

So I decided this year, I’m sticking to the basics:

365 SHORT STORIES CHALLENGE

Every year, I challenge myself to read one short story per day. Some years I keep the pace well, and some years I fall behind and then scramble to catch up (and some years, I catch up and fall behind again, and some years I blow past the goal handily). I’m defining “short story” as anything from flash fiction to novella-length. I am going to once again make an effort to review one or two stories every Sunday in my “Sunday Shorts” feature.

GOODREADS CHALLENGE

Goodreads allows members to set a challenge. In previous years, I’ve set goals ranging from 125 to 150 books. For 2024, I’m setting a goal of 120 to start with (10 books per month), and we’ll see what happens.

MOVIE CHALLENGE

I own a lot of DVDs. (I know, you’re shocked. Shocked!) Every year I say, “This is the year I’m going to make an effort to watch them!” And then, somehow, I … don’t. One year, I did a list of 12 and two alternates as I do for the TBR Challenge, called it the TBW Challenge … and failed it miserably. Last year, I got about halfway to the goal of 52 movies, an average of one per week. So this year, I’m setting myself the same challenge. This includes movies on DVD, streaming services, and any trips to an actual movie theater (which have become rare for me).

TELEVISION CHALLENGE

Did I mention I own a lot of DVDs? And that I’m subscribed to a lot of streaming services? I did? Well, you won’t be shocked to know that it’s not all about the movies. So I’m setting myself a “TV Series Watch” challenge akin to my Short Story Challenge: an average of one full episode of a television series (regardless of length) for each day in the year, which this year means 365 episodes.

LIVE THEATRE CHALLENGE

I did pretty well with this one in 2023, even though I never posted about it (because I posted extraordinarily little here in 2023, but that’s a subject for another post), so I’m making it official for 2024: I want to see at least 1 live theatrical performance per month. Most of them will be in New York City, but I’ll count any play, musical, opera, ballet, or staged reading I see anywhere, regardless of whether it’s fully professional productions, college, community theatre, whatever. (Music concerts, author signings, and conferences/conventions do not count towards this.)

ACCOUNTABILITY

So how am I going to hold myself accountable? I’m planning to bring back my monthly Reading RoundUps. I’m not going to rename/rebrand because I like the alliterative title (which falls well in line with Series Saturday, Sunday Shorts, and a few other blog series I’m hoping to make regular features in 2025), but those posts will also track the Viewing challenges.

I would love to hear what YOUR Reading, Writing, or Viewing Challenges are for 2024. Let me know in the comments!

Book Review: TIDAL CREATURES

TITLE: Tidal Creatures (Alchemical Journeys #3)

AUTHOR: Seanan McGuire

453 pages, TorDotCom, ISBN 9781250333551 (hardcover; also e-book and audiobook)

MY RATING:  5 stars out of 5

Tidal Creatures continues to build out the world Seanan McGuire introduced us to in Middlegame and deepened in Seasonal Fears. Like Seasonal Fears, it starts off by introducing us to a new batch of characters that personify/anthropomorphize a new set of universal concepts. In this case, embodiments of the Moon in all the forms such embodiments have taken throughout all the world’s mythologies. Unlike the main characters of Middlegame (who are forced to become the embodiment of the Doctrine of Ethos by their Maker) and Seasonal Fears (who become embodiments only after winning a competition), the human embodiments of the Moon are chosen by the Moon gods/goddesses themselves and the situation is less “embodiment” and more “time-share.” The human avatars of the Moon are able to go about their lives as essentially human, except when the Moon needs to shine through them and the resident Moon god/dess must take full control. I loved this idea that in a universe where almost every natural concept/constant is embodied, the ways the embodiments function can be so varied.

Where Seasonal Fears was a road-trip novel, Tidal Creatures is a murder-mystery. (It’s been long enough since I’ve read Middlegame that I’m not sure what classic genre I’d place it in (I really need to do a re-read), but at this point I’m almost positive part of McGuire’s plan for this series is to use the trappings of a different classic genre for each entry.) Someone is killing the moon gods of the San Francisco area. Which is a problem because part of the job of the Moon gods is to cross the sky above the Impossible City (the heart of all creation, thanks to the alchemy of an author named A. Deborah Baker). The moon gods who notice what’s happening must figure out who is doing it before they can wrest control of the Impossible City (and thus, the universe) for themselves. This is a very “fair play” mystery – meaning all the clues are there for the reader to figure out the who, why, and how (because how the murder that start the book was even possible, given the victim was the living embodiment of the moon and fully empowered when it happened, is part of the mystery). Readers who enjoy having a juicy mystery in the middle of their fantasy/horror hybrid novel will not be disappointed and will probably enjoy the challenge of figuring it all out before the characters do.

Several of the main characters of the novel are the local embodiments of three moon goddesses and a moon god: Judy (Chang’e), Anna (Artemis), Professor Williams (Diana), and David (Máni). They are more like co-workers than friends, and even though they are all embodiments of the Moon, they are embodiments of different Moon deities, with different mindsets and histories, so they are not automatically best friends and comrades. I really appreciated that while two of these moon deities are familiar to just about anyone who experienced a public-school education in the United States, McGuire went out of her way to make the other two deities from non-Eastern-European traditions, and to give us a deep sense of what those deities were like in those traditions. She made me want to learn more about Chang’e and her peaches of immortality, Máni, and others who are mentioned but play less significant roles in the way the story plays out (Losna, Aske).

The moon deities are not the only main characters. There’s also Kelpie, a woman who thought her current unusual body type (mostly human, but with orange skin and legs that end in hooves and a few more subtle differences) was the result of a horrible lab accident that also wiped her memory. She learns what she really is and goes on the run from her employers, the Alchemical Congress of the United States, after her friend and mentor is killed for seemingly failing in a project designed to get the Congress access to the Impossible City before it is claimed by its rightful rulers. She encounters a boy name Luis and his mother, Isabella, who is an hechicera (a type of sorceress), who join her in her quest to find someone who can help her understand herself and help stop the man pursuing her.

In Kelpie, we have one of the most stunning portrayals of a person escaping and overcoming the trauma of gaslighting that I think I’ve ever read – a woman whose whole sense of self and purpose gets uprooted and who still finds ways to stay strong, move forward, and come to terms with what she really is. In Isabella, we get a stark indictment of the ways in which European colonization practically (and in some cases, totally) eradicated other belief systems (by absorption or by destruction).

I found aspects of each of the main characters relatable, and I came to care for all of them as much as I did the main characters of Middlegame and Seasonal Fears. And for those wondering, I can say without spoilers that while the MCs of Seasonal Fears only get a few passing mentions, the MCs of Middlegame enter the story much earlier, and play a much bigger role, than they did in Season Fears.

Fans of Seanan McGuire, fans of mystery-fantasy-horror hybrids, fans of tales of moon deities: you’ll find something to love about this book. BUT – you should probably at least read Middlegame if not Seasonal Fears before Tidal Creatures, to understand the alchemical underpinnings of the world and the history of the Alchemical Congress.

I received an advance reading pdf of this book for free via NetGalley from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. I received and read the ARC well before publication date but dropped the ball on posting the review until now. Tidal Creatures is currently available wherever books are sold.

You can read my review of book two in the series, Seasonal Fears, HERE. Somehow, I never posted a review of Middlegame. I’ll have to reread it and fix that one of these days.