Siavahda's Blog

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted over at Wishful Endings to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about but haven’t yet read. Most of the time they’re books that have yet to be released, but not always. It’s based on the Waiting on Wednesday meme, which was originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine. 

You can find the releases I’m most anticipating this year over on my Unmissable list, but I use Can’t-Wait Wednesday to feature books I’m hopeful about but aren’t 100% sure will be five star reads.

This week my Can’t-Wait-For Book is The Sheltering Flame by Ruthanna Emrys!

Wiz Duos - Book 3 by Ruthanna Emrys, Andrew Knighton
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Published on: 30th October 2025
Goodreads

Two novellas in one book

The Sheltering Flame by Ruthanna Emrys

Three old friends fleeing from their lives in academia take on a unique restoration project in the hills of New England, only to find that the stewardship of their crumbling new property comes with a magical obligation. When a desperate teenager turns up on their doorstep claiming sanctuary, it brings them into direct conflict with an ancient power of the land – one who rules over its debtors without mercy. The Hearth’s new keepers have 24 hours to save their new friend, fulfill their unexpected obligations, and claim the future they didn’t know they wanted.

Walking a Wounded Land by Andrew Knighton

Ghosts linger amid the fields and streets of England, waiting to be summoned by those who can walk their paths. Paul is one of the walkers, returned home to follow in a friend's last footsteps and learn how he died. But the land is a place of conflict, caught between connection and control. To find peace, Paul will have to confront his own past and other people's power, in a poignant tale of grief, justice, and walking your own path.

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Emry’s book The Half-Built Garden gave me galaxy-brain and brought me to tears (in the best way), so obviously I have been keeping an eye out for more writing from her. I am definitely not smart enough for a lot of her non-fiction, but I was EXTREMELY EXCITED to see we’re getting a new novella from her!

(Sidenote: I think it’s GENIUS to put two novellas together in one book! GENIUS! It’s so frustrating paying full-novel princes for something like Tor.com’s novellas ((though let’s be clear: plenty of people price their novellas more reasonably!)) and this is such a great alternative!)

I’ve never read Fantasy from Emrys (I did start her book Winter Tide, but I’m really not a Lovecraft fan) and I am SO HYPED to see her take on it! I really can’t emphasise enough how Half-Built Garden rewired my brain and made me consider a) a bunch of new ideas and concepts and b) things I thought I knew, but in a very different way. That was Sci Fi; how will she write MAGIC? Which is, after all, my ultimate love?

EEEEEEE!

If you’re in the UK, you can buy paper copies directly from the publisher (and get a free ebook copy!)

The post I Can’t Wait For…The Sheltering Flame by Ruthanna Emrys appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Cinder House by Freya Marske
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bisexual MC, listing other rep would be spoilers
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
ISBN: 1250341728
Goodreads

Sparks fly and lovers dance in this gorgeous, yearning Cinderella retelling from bestselling author Freya Marske —a queer Gothic romance perfect for fans of Naomi Novik and T. Kingfisher.

Ella is a haunting.

Murdered at sixteen, her ghost is furiously trapped in her father's house, invisible to everyone except her stepmother and stepsisters.

Even when she discovers how to untether herself from her prison, there are limits. She cannot be seen or heard by the living people who surround her. Her family must never learn she is able to leave. And at the stroke of every midnight, she finds herself back on the staircase where she died.

Until she forges a wary friendship with a fairy charm-seller, and makes a bargain for three nights of almost-living freedom. Freedom that means she can finally be seen. Danced with. Touched.

You think you know Ella's the ball, the magical shoes, the handsome prince.

You're halfway right, and all-the-way wrong.

Rediscover a classic fairy tale in this debut novella from "the queen of romantic fantasy" (Polygon).

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As someone who has no strong feelings about Cinderella as a fairytale, I LOVE how original and unexpected Marske managed to make this retelling, while still keeping it very recognisable as a retelling!

Cinderella-as-ghost is definitely not a take I’ve seen before, but Marske’s take on ghost-hood is genuinely cool. Ella is the house she haunts; if someone breaks a window, it hurts her (this is how her stepfamily gets her to serve them) and when she feels emotions, she doesn’t experience them like we do (because as a spirit she has no endocrine system, or body parts to be governed by an endocrine system, for that matter): instead, she feels them with her floorboards, her copper pipes, her rooftiles. Arousal and sex are very different for a ghost-as-house, and it was hilarious to read things like walking on a carpet framed as erotica.

But the moments of hilarity are very few: Ella’s situation is enraging and heartbreaking, and I wanted to whoop when she discovered a way to leave the house for a while, and started finding some joys in her afterlife. The fairy charm-seller mentioned in the blurb was a delight throughout, and Ella’s visits to the theatre, especially the ballet, where just…you could feel the genuine passion Ella had, for the artform, for the dance troupe, for the other regular attendees in the audience. It was such a human thing, a real-person thing; it made her immensely more real to me – and, I think, to herself, which is a big part of the story: Ella finding a way to be a person again after years of miserable stasis.

In the author’s note at the end, Marske talks about this being a book about disability and chronic illness, and I feel like SUCH A MORON for not putting that together while I was reading! I’ve literally spent the years since Covid appeared in strict isolation, barely leaving the house – and that’s exactly the situation Marske was drawing on, was recreating and reinterpreting via Ella’s connection/binding to the house. Talk about a galaxy-brain moment – looking back on the story with that in mind, I had to give it an extra half-star, because that’s genius, and so well done (it’s not Marske’s fault I’m too dumb to get it until it was pointed out, okay?) Ella’s finding-a-way-to-be-a-person-again journey, for example, hits very differently in that context; her limited awareness of the outer world, her invisibility and isolation, the passions she develops (like the ballet) but can’t share with anyone – that’s exactly what it’s like, being housebound, and/or being in public as a visibly disabled person. Even the sort-of friendship Ella manages to create with a pen pal echoes the online friendships that are sometimes all people like me can have. Or the muted ‘strangeness’ of Ella’s sexuality, her inability to have what for ease of conversation I’ll call ‘normal’ sex – yeah, that’s definitely a thing within disabled spaces. Your desires being considered alien, or at least very weird; the accommodations, experiments, and hoops you have to jump through to have sex with a disabled body. I can even see Ella’s inability to touch people as an exaggerated version of my own fibro, which can often mean that touching other people hurts, making it impossible.

I have a lot of Feels about this, clearly.

There was also – I found this a little frustrating at times (see: I am very dumb and apparently need quite a lot spelled out for me) but even so, I really appreciated how much Marske showed us without telling us. A number of things are very quietly presented to us as puzzle pieces, and Marske makes no attempt to obfuscate them or anything, but she does leave it up to us to put the pieces together. (See: the secret in the attic.) This is something I haven’t seen a lot of recently, and I liked it even when it left me a little confused. (Genuinely wanted to head-desk after I figured out the attic thing. WHY SO SLOW, SIA?) I think it helped balance the built-in constraints of a novella format – on the one hand, novellas often feel a little rushed, and I thought this one did, but Marske’s minimal telling helped offset that. And that combination is DEFINITELY something I haven’t seen in a while.

Kind of related – I noticed this in Swordspoint, and Marske does it again in Cinder House, carefully designing and placing small details of worldbuilding with the precision of a jeweller, details that are not especially strange but anchor the story (and setting) powerfully. For example: only Ella’s stepmother and -sisters can see her, because they own the house she is part of. Only those with a claim to the property can see ghosts attached to it. That is a) objectively interesting and b) absolutely fascinating when we consider that this is not objective reality. Ella’s father died, leaving the house to her in his will (presumably why the stepmother had to murder them both, not just her husband); Ella died a few minutes later. So if the magic only cared about objective reality, the stepmother does not own the house, because she was not Ella’s heir. But the stepmother lies, says Ella died first, which would mean that the stepmother inherits as the father’s spouse. But that’s not objectively true, it’s only true in the eyes of (fallible) human law – and yet the magic follows, is defined by, human law. Is this a mindblowingly unique concept? I guess not, but it doesn’t have to be: it still gives the story heft, adds a level of – realism seems like the wrong word, but I’m not sure what word would be better. Believability? Authenticity? Something like that.

And there are a fair few other details of the story/worldbuilding that are like that, but I won’t spoil them for you!

I did wish Cinder House was longer – probably not a full novel, but a bit longer than it is. I’d have liked to have seen excerpts from the letters, for example, to help develop that relationship in my mind, and I wish we could’ve gotten a little more time with Princess Nadya (who, for the record, RULES)(unintended pun but I’m keeping it). And I thought the stretch of time we had before Ella learned to leave the house felt rushed – but then, I’m not sure how that could have been avoided: there simply wasn’t much story to tell there. I wish Marske had done more with the feeling-with-parts-of-the-house thing; most of the time it felt like a superficial detail, and I thought it could have been done better with a little more poetry in the descriptions of it.

But! I’ll wrap this up by saying that I freaking LOVED the romance, both as an endgame [View post to see spoiler] and in the very unusual choice Princess Nadya made regarding her for-politics marriage. [View post to see spoiler]

This is just – a lot of really neat, unusual choices and thoughts and ideas pretending to be a familiar story; pretending so well that its familiarity feels warm and soft and oddly comforting. At a glance, Cinder House isn’t too weird; but when you start looking at all the little details in there, and considering them, Marske’s genius becomes very obvious. (Even without the disability metaphor/rep.) I enjoyed it more than I loved it – some of my rating is for technical appreciation for Marske’s craft, rather than for love of what she did with it – but I know I’ll be thinking about this one for a long while yet.

The post A Metaphor That Hit Me Hard: Cinder House by Freya Marske appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bi/pansexual MC, chronically ill MC, MLM MC, major trans-or-SOMETHING character
PoV: Third-person, present-tense; multiple PoVs
Published on: 14th October 2025
ISBN: 1250811228
Goodreads

He was sent to kill a pest. Instead, he found a monster.

One of BookPage's Most Anticipated SFF & Horror of Fall 2025

Enter the decadent, deadly city of Tiliard, a metropolis carved into the stump of an ancient tree. In its canopy, the pampered elite warp minds with toxic perfume; in its roots, gangs of exterminators hunt a colossal worm with an appetite for beauty.

In this complex, chaotic city, Guy Moulène has a simple goal: keep his sister out of debt. For her sake, he'll take on any job, no matter how vile.

As an exterminator, Guy hunts the uncanny creatures that crawl up from the river. These vermin are all strange, and often dangerous. His latest quarry is different: a centipede the size of a dragon with a deadly venom and a ravenous taste for artwork. As it digests Tiliard from the sewers to the opera houses, its toxin reshapes the future of the city. No sane person would hunt it, if they had the choice.

Guy doesn't have a choice.

“I will follow this writer anywhere.” —Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl

I received 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.

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~rococo bugpunk (with actual punk!)
~opera as a bloodsport
~political movements as art
~prose to get drunk on
~queer as in rainbow
~queer as in strange
~so good I read it twice

I think it says all that needs saying that when I first reached 70% of this book, I couldn’t handle it being nearly over…so I went back to the beginning and started it again.

I suspect a third read is in my near future.

If you read Ennes’ debut Leech, then I don’t need to sell you on this author because you already know they’re a genius. But I will say that Works of Vermin is incandescently and extravagantly weirder than Leech was – to the point where, having now read both, I’m now convinced Leech was Ennes toning themself down in order to test the (silvery, burning) waters of the publishing industry, the equivalent of dipping their toes into The Market to see if it was able to handle such a writer, such a wildly warped imagination (complimentary). Because it sure feels like WoV is Ennes letting loose, going no-holds-barred baroque, gleefully cutting the safety line and dropping us into free-fall.

I loved it. Obviously.

If you haven’t read Leech, then please brace for gorgeous wtfuckery, ecstatic prose, and genres that smear into each other to become something unnameable.

(Seriously, what are we calling this book? Horror? Dark Fantasy? Secondary-World SciFi? I could make arguments for all three and none of them would be wholly correct.)

My favourite kinds of books are often called fever-dreams, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a case where that was so justified as here. Works of Vermin feels exactly like being lost in a high fever; it is a grotesque rococo hallucination, surely impossible for a sober, lucid mind to ever dream up. It has all the infectious passion of a fever; it consumes the reader like one, like a brain-eating disease or a hallucinogen cut with something deadly. It gets into your blood; you have no antibodies for a book like this. There is no vaccine, no cure. You can only be obsessed.

Heads will roll like fruit, but he knows those that fall will be the ripest, not the rotten.

As if dosed with the ecdytoxin the book revolves around, every thread of Works of Vermin mutates into something else before the final page; we open with Guy, a lowly pest exterminator who does sex work on the side to keep his feral younger sister fed and clothed; and Aster, a perfumer – which is something between an alchemist, wizard, and personal stylist, in this setting – whose lungs were badly damaged by a chemical weapon when she was a child, in the city’s last civil war. Guy and his coworkers are hunting a very, very big bug; Aster is sent to ‘acquire’ a dancer for her employer and patron, the Marshal (think head of the military under a dictator; he’s not the dictator, but he is not someone you want to fuck with). By the end, the city is on fire, and neither Guy nor Aster’s stories are anything like what you thought they’d be at the beginning.

Because the bug produces ecdytoxin, which warps (horrifyingly, exquisitely) everything it comes into contact with, organic or non-organic – and there are far too many people who see the potential in that. Because Aster goes to fetch a dancer and meets someone very strange, with even stranger embroidery. And on those two happenstance facts, our story turns.

Elspeth and Mallory play, one like a stanza of metered verse, the other like an honest, if not funny, slip of the tongue

Vermin is doing and saying so much, on so many levels, and I can’t tell if any of it was conscious and deliberate or if Ennes’ mind just works like this. (Again: extremely complimentary.) On the one hand, it feels as precise as jewelled clockwork – but on the other hand, it feels so lushly, horrifyingly organic, in the vein of ophiocordyceps unilateralis puppeting zombie ants or male angler fish dissolving themselves into the flesh of female ones. There are all sorts of little motifs and tableaus and recurring themes, glinting like gold thread amid the dark, meaty silk of the story Ennes has woven – like thumb names, and Guylag’s dragon, or even the Revivalist movement, which presents itself as bringing life back to Tilliard. But unstoppable life is just cancer, and with the way ecdytoxin mutates everything from bodies to buildings, the scathing commentary isn’t subtle.

“What fucking choice do I have?”

“Same choice we all have, my dear. Same as every creature. Domestication, or extermination.”

And I don’t want to tell you anything else about the plot; it will be so much better if you go in as blind as possible. I’ll only say that you should pay attention to character names, to people’s titles, and that this is a story that lavishes rewards on those who take heed of every detail, who linger to savour them. Which is seductively easy to do, in this book of all books, where every word is a silken firework in your head, phantasmagoric music to your ear. Enne’s prose in Leech was exquisite: in Vermin, it is sublime, and I mean that in a near-spiritual sense. This is syntax so gorgeous you’d lick it off a scalpel, toxically psychedelic but so impossibly sweet you go feral for it anyway, knowingly rabid for it, starving for it, turning the pages faster and faster. You’ll swear the ink is a poison, a potion, seeping into your skin every time you turn the page.

the Palas. The eloquent threat of a building looms a few blocks northward, panes of watchful stained glass winking up its turrets. Golden light threads across armories and prison towers, up the dome that bumps against the broken half-moon like the puffed chest of a rival god.

This is language that bites you, envenoms you, leaves you with opalescent scars. I lost count of how many lines I highlighted, how many times I paused to roll a sentence around my mouth like candy, how many times I swooned at the razor-gleaming brilliance of a turn of phrase, a simile, a moment of dialogue. It is not purple, and it is inextricably tied to the extravagance of the worldbuilding – they reinforce each other, the writing and the world, the world and the writing, they complete each other, they melt into each other to become a mutated secret third thing, and it is unspeakably glorious.

As is the blase, effortless queerness, and that shouldn’t be a surprise after Leech, but someone smarter than me needs to write us all an essay on how Ennes is not just playing with sex and gender but with queer theory, with the concept of queerness as strangeness (on multiple different levels). This is storytelling, queered, and that means so much more than the sexuality or gender identity of its characters. I can barely articulate it, but I know it when I see it, and friends, this is it.

“God, you’re beautiful. Stay ruthless for me.”

The TL;DR is that all of Works of Vermin is like this. Ennes has created a world where the sun is green and water burns; where deaths onstage at the opera are very real; where debts are tattooed and successes are embedded in your skin as gems. Perfume is mindfuckery; the right scent can make others see you as taller, or more charismatic, or tidying papers when you’re actually sweeping them all to the floor. And the story itself – this is a book about civil war, and theatre, and a society wedding. It’s about poverty and art and dictatorship. It’s about chemical (corporate) warfare and so many kinds of love, many of them as warped as if they’d been attacked by the beauty-eating bug. (Perhaps that is another level of the metaphor? I wouldn’t put it past Ennes for a second.) It’s about siblings who’d burn the world down for each other. It’s horror as art, politics as art; art as transience, art as mutation, art as a weapon and an escape. There is plot-relevant embroidery. As a whole, it’s kin to Kerstin Hall’s Asunder, the kind of opulent dark weirdness that is soul-scarring.

Forget the best of year list; Works of Vermin is going on my next Best of the Decade list.

I don’t know how else to say it.

If this review is a little manic, well, you won’t blame me after you read this queer rococo bugpunk book for yourself. I’m still high on the venom, and I suspect I will be for a long while.

And I’m not even a little bit sorry.

The post Incandescently and Extravagantly Weird: The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted over at Wishful Endings to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about but haven’t yet read. Most of the time they’re books that have yet to be released, but not always. It’s based on the Waiting on Wednesday meme, which was originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine. 

This week my Can’t-Wait-For Book is Villain by Natalie Zina Walschots!

Villain (Hench, #2) by Natalie Zina Walschots
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Representation: Bi/pansexual disabled MC
Published on: 19th May 2026
Goodreads

The Boys meets Starter Villain and Assistant to the Villain in Natalie Zina Walschots’s electrifying, sharp, violent, and hilarious sequel to the highly acclaimed novel Hench, in which the Auditor must confront the near-impossible in order to right the many wrongs in the superhuman industry…or cause more of them. She’s not picky.

Anna, better known to superheroes as the Auditor, has carved out a name for herself. Any hero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, success should taste she has an incredible job with lots of perks, and her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated and literally ground to a pulp.

But Anna still has her sights set on a greater destroying the Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good, and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.

Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has vanished without a trace, leaving Anna to examine all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty fill the air, and fear that this moment of triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.

Anna soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her…someone much more the Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. This isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as the fight spirals deeper and deeper, with new foes popping up every day—she’ll need more than just her superpower—data research—to keep ascending through the supervillain ranks.

It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.

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AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Listen. L I S T E N! Hench is one of my forever-books, okay? It’s SO fucking good: it’s viciously clever, it’s wet-yourself-laughing hilarious, it has a deeply non-traditional non-sexual romance that makes my queer weirdo soul go heart-eyes, it’s so effortlessly inclusive, it’s so so so unique and outside-the-box AND I LOVE IT AND WILL LOVE IT FOREVER!

And it didn’t end on a stupid cliffhanger or anything, I didn’t think we would get a sequel because Hench didn’t need one. You know? There was room for sequels but it was a perfect standalone, too. BUT YOU BETTER BELIEVE I SHRIEKED TO THE STARS WHEN A SEQUEL WAS ANNOUNCED!

And yes yes yes, whatever, the pub date was pushed back several times, I DON’T CARE, authors can rewrite and edit as much as they want and I will only be grateful (you deal with all the stress of delaying release so that the book I eventually get to read is perfect??? THANK YOU <3) but the current pub date is for-sure-final AND LOOK WE EVEN HAVE A COVER NOW!!!

I love it so much, like, flaily-shrieky much. IT MATCHES THE HENCH COVER SO PERFECTLY! (It didn’t even occur to me before that some twit in the cover department might give the sequel a completely different style of cover, because sometimes that happens, doesn’t it? I’M SO HAPPY IT DIDN’T THIS TIME) Anna with her cane, front and centre! Excuse me while I get a bit weepy. (I’m a lot more disabled than I was when Hench came out, okay, getting a disabled character on the cover hits a lot harder now!)

And if you haven’t read Hench yet – that’s okay! Villain won’t be out until next May, so you have LOADS of time! I’ll even join you – I will ABSOLUTELY be rereading Hench to prepare!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go back to going

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

The post I Can’t Wait For…Villain by Natalie Zina Walschots appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

soupçon/ˈsuːpsɒn,ˈsuːpsɒ̃/ noun
1. a very small quantity of something; a slight trace, as of a particular taste or flavor

Sunday Soupçons is where I scribble mini-reviews for books I don’t have the brainspace/eloquence/smarts to write about in depth – or if I just don’t have anything interesting to say beyond I LIKED IT AND YOU SHOULD READ IT TOO!

Both these books deserve MUCH better reviews than I can write them at the moment – so just take it as read that I love them both extremely!

Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens by Lynn Hutchinson Lee
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Horror
Representation: Romany MC, secondary Native American character
PoV: First-person, present-tense
ISBN: 1738316521
Goodreads

Orchid Lovell is a young Romany woman haunted by a fear of being found out. Her family has been chased out of town before. After settling in a seemingly idyllic northern mining town that she soon understands as rife with unseen cruelty, Orchid finds solace in a lush orchid fen where she doesn’t fear the town’s judgement. Amid the green beauty of the fen, Orchid meets her beloved Jack, and marries him in a secret blackfly-infested ceremony.

But the town’s waters don’t only harbor life. In the nearby creek, dead girls take revenge on the men who murdered them, luring them into murky waters. Despite the unyielding nature of the water spirits, one man evades their violence. After a devastating attack linked to the expansion of the mine, Orchid’s fate is entwined with the panni raklies’ ruthless justice.

Written in over 100 dreamy mini-chapters, this novella explores the tenuous reality of the Romany diaspora living in troubled times on troubled lands.

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Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens is one of those thrillingly odd treasures that couldn’t care less about being easily categoriseable. Call me whatever genre you like, it says, but I will only be myself. It’s a little bit magical realism, a little bit horror, a dash of eco-fiction, almost poetry. The prose is lush even while what’s being written about is so perfectly mundane, and the contrast of that is head-spinning in a most wonderful way. And it’s not just prose; Lee weaves together text-message chains, excerpts from non-fiction, even shopping lists to tell this story, to ground it in the real world and the travails of ‘normal’ daily life, which makes it all feel so much more real and vivid than if all the focus had been on the magic.

The plot wanders, neither perfectly linear nor entirely straightforward. On the one hand, Orchid is building a small but heart-felt life with her husband Jack, and reconnecting with her ill mother; on the other, the local fen that is Orchid’s sanctuary is under threat from the proposed expansion of the local mine, being pushed by the town’s richest family. Within the fen are panni raklies, water spirits who started out as human women before they were murdered by men; Orchid is fascinated by them, knew some of them while they were human. The existence of the panni raklies is an open secret among the women of the town, but is kept hidden from the men

The role of men is to know nothing.

and somehow this is all of a piece with the antiziganism, external and internalised, that Orchid deals with – because while she passes as Caucasian, she’s still surrounded by her mother’s (justified!) fears and the casual micro-aggressions of fans of the ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’ tv show. (Sidenote: ew, why is this is a thing, I was so disappointed in humanity when I realised this was a real thing not something Lee made up for her book.)

It’s a weird treasure of a book, full of powerful relationships (Orchid and Jack, Orchid and her mother, Orchid and Rose, her Native American best friend who understands what it’s like to be a minority surrounded by clueless-at-best white people) and dark, twisted themes. Violence against women, especially domestic partner violence and the disappearances of Native American women, are quiet but ever-present threads; then there’s the kind of violence done for money, houses burned down and cars driven off the road to silence protests against the mine’s expansion. It should be ugly, but it isn’t, in large part thanks to Lee’s absolutely stunning prose, which I would lick off a knife if I could.

Most of us come from away. Coming with hope across an ocean or from other towns, seeking a new life in this new place with its buried gold, too many of us believing nobody had ever lived here before we came. We invent or erase histories, tell the old fairy tales and myths and come up with new ones. We repurpose lives, gossip, tell stories, but never the truth. Never the darkness. The dark of the mine with its claws in the earth, in the people. The mine batters the men, the men batter the women and children, and the dead take their revenge.

Especially when it comes to writing about nature, all the flora and fauna of the fen. I am NOT a wilderness person, I don’t do well with mud and bugs, but Lee – I don’t know if it’s truer to say that her writing transformed these things for me, or if she removed some scales from my eyes to show me how beautiful these things are, that I was missing. Regardless, it’s very nearly a spiritual experience.

I’d rather be at the fen, that place where the laws are true, real, embedded in the underground networks humming from root to root.

The ending was a little random, a little maddeningly inexplicable, but I’m so glad I read this, and I hope it gets to more readers.

You can find a MUCH better review of this book over here!

Two Dark Moons (Sãoni Cycle, #1) by Avi Silver
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists, YA
Representation: Aromantic pansexual MC, nonbinary love interest, F/NB
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
ISBN: 1775242730
Goodreads

Sohmeng Par is sick of being treated like a child. Ever since a tragic accident brought her mountain community’s coming-of-age ritual to a halt, she’s caused nothing but trouble in her impatience to become an adult. But when she finally has the chance to prove herself, she’s thrown from her life in the mountains and into the terror of the jungle below.

Cornered by a colony of reptilian predators known as the sãoni, Sohmeng is rescued by Hei, an eccentric exile with no shortage of secrets. As likely to bite Sohmeng as they are to cook her breakfast, this stranger and their family of lizards are like nothing she’s ever seen before. If she wants to survive, she must find a way to adapt to the vibrant, deadly world of the rainforest and the creatures that inhabit it—including Hei themself. But Sohmeng has secrets of her own, and sharing them could mean losing everything a second time.

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Gender weirdness wrapped up in a giant-lizard adventure! This is another quick read, but otherwise couldn’t be more different from Origins of Desire. It’s outright fantasy, for one thing, in a secondary-world setting with multiple moons, set in a culture where your gender (and thus role in the community) is determined by your birth month. I LOVE unusual gender systems, and this one delighted me in many ways (not least because ‘feminine’ in this culture means something like aggressive, dominant, problem-solver – so even without the moon phases/birth months, gender here looks very different from the Global North take in our world!)

Sohmeng is an IMMENSELY sympathetic character, a teenager who wants to be allowed to be a teenager instead of being kept to the role of a child – and who is being kept in that role for utterly ridiculous reasons. (Sorry, but it’s true. When cultural traditions stop being helpful and just cause harm, as this one is doing, you’re supposed to get rid of them! Not cling to them even more tightly!) Of course, the moment she convinces her community to give her an inch, she…falls off the mountain they live in.

It’s very difficult not to read this as divine punishment. Probably it was just bad luck! But. Eep.

At the mountain’s base, the jungle that makes up most of the region is full of dangerous beasties, not least the sãoni, six-legged giant lizards fully capable of eating humans. But instead of being eaten, Sohmeng gets adopted. Cue my original review of this book: Sometimes a family is you, the kid that screech-danced and bit you, and a pack of (not!-)murderous lizards. And that’s okay.

It is, in fact, more than okay: it’s almost idyllic. The relationship that develops between Sohmeng and Hei – the first human to be adopted by this sãoni pack – is really sweet, and a refreshing change from your typical romance because Sohmeng is aromantic (but not asexual). And that is completely fine. It doesn’t bother Hei in the slightest, and, just – it brought tears to my eyes, okay, how much of a non-issue it was! It made me SO HAPPY!

Sohmeng and Hei together start to unravel the mysteries behind the changes in the region – changes that led to the loss of Sohmeng’s parents and Sohmeng being unable to undergo her adulthood rites. There are some tough-to-swallow reveals, but the story ends – a little abruptly, it must be said – before anything can really be done. Though the ending does hint strongly at what direction Sohmeng and Hei will be going in next – if, that is, Sohmeng can convince the prickly Hei that her idea is a good one.

On to book two!

What have you been reading this week?

The post Sunday Soupçons #42 appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Have I finished my Summer tbr? Absolutely not. Will that stop me making a new one? Refer to previous answer, please!

Specifically, these are the horror and horror-adjacent reads near the top of my tbr, which seemed like a seasonally-appropriate theme!

Between the Walls by Caspian Faye
Genres: Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Horror, Queer Protagonists, YA
Representation: Queer MC, trans love interest, M/M
Goodreads

When James Thorne and his recently divorced dad move into their new house, in a new town, looking for a new start, James can’t help thinking about all he’s left behind.

Missing his best friend, his high-maintenance boyfriend, and troubled by the paranormal occurrences rattling his nerves, James wishes he’d never moved.

But when his presence awakens Nathaniel, the ghost of a seventeen year old trans boy who has haunted the walls of this house since the 1700s, things take a surprising turn.

After a false start or two, Nathaniel and James hit it off, an easy connection that could become something more.

But only if they survive.

Because Nathaniel isn’t the only ghost haunting this house. In the basement hides a dark entity, longing to escape, to claim their souls.

Can James and Nathaniel cross the boundaries of the living and the dead in order to see each other and themselves for who they truly are?

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Will this be actually scary? I doubt it – off the top of my head I can’t remember a YA horror ever properly freaking me out – but who knows! Either way I really like the premise.

A Sword of Bronze and Ashes by Anna Smith Spark
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Horror
Published on: 12th September 2023
Goodreads

Readers of Shauna Lawless and Thilde Kold Holdt will love this Celtic-inflected adventure by critically acclaimed, grimdark epic fantasy novelist, Anna Smith Spark.

A Sword of Bronze and Ashes combines the fierce beauty of Celtic myth with grimdark battle violence. It's a lyrical, folk horror high fantasy.

Kanda has a good life until shadows from her past return threatening everything she loves. And Kanda, like any parent, has things in her past she does not want her children to know. Red war is pursued by an ancient evil, Kanda must call upon all her strength to protect her family. But how can she keep her children safe, if they want to stand as warriors beside her when the light fades and darkness rises?

FLAME TREE PRESS is the imprint of long-standing independent Flame Tree Publishing, dedicated to full-length original fiction in the horror and suspense, science fiction & fantasy, and crime / mystery / thriller categories. The list brings together fantastic new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices. Learn more about Flame Tree Press at www.flametreepress.com and connect on social media @FlameTreePress

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Officially I’m already reading this one, but I got distracted. I need to focus back in on it! What I’ve read so far has been equal parts beautiful and horrifying, with an interestingly off-beat writing rhythm.

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Queer MC
Published on: 14th October 2025
Goodreads

'An intriguing work of whimsi-grotesquerie' OLIVIE BLAKE

He was sent to kill a pest. Instead, he found a monster.

Enter the decadent, deadly city of Tiliard, carved into the stump of an ancient tree. In its canopy, the pampered elite warp minds with toxic perfume; in its roots, gangs of exterminators hunt a colossal worm with an appetite for beauty.

In a complex, chaotic city, Guy Moulène has a simple keep his sister out of debt. For her sake, he'll take on any job, no matter how vile.

As an exterminator, Guy hunts the uncanny pests that crawl up from the river. These vermin are all strange, and often dangerous. His latest quarry is a worm the size of a dragon with a deadly venom and a ravenous taste for artwork. As it digests Tiliard from the sewers to the opera houses, its toxin reshapes the future of the city. No sane person would hunt it, if they had the choice.

Guy doesn't have a choice.

'A lush and seductive story, rife with opulent horror and decaying decadence' SUNYI DEAN

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Again, I started this one ages ago – but when I got to 70%, I stopped, because I DIDN’T WANT IT TO END! So I’m restarting it. It’s so horrifically gorgeous and weird with the most incredibly unique worldbuilding!!!

Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Stories by Bora Chung, Anton Hur
Genres: Adult, Horror
Goodreads

From the author and translator of the National Book Award finalist and Booker Prize shortlisted Cursed Bunny, comes a new novel-in-ghost-stories, set in a mysterious research center that houses cursed objects, where those who open the wrong door might find it’s disappeared behind them, or that the echoing footsteps they’re running from are their own…

The acclaimed Korean horror and sci-fi writer’s goosebump-inducing new book follows an employee on the night shift at the Institute. They soon learn why some employees don't last long at the center. The handkerchief in Room 302 once belonged to the late mother of two sons, whose rivalry imbues the handkerchief with undue power and unravels those around it. The cursed sneaker down the hall is stolen by a live-streaming, ghost-chasing employee, who later finds he can’t escape its tread. A cat in Room 206 reveals the crimes of its former family, trying to understand its own path to the Institute’s halls.

But Chung's haunted institute isn't just a chilling place to play. As in her astounding collections Cursed Bunny and Your Utopia, these violent allegories take on the horrors of animal testing, conversion therapy, domestic abuse, and late-stage capitalism. Equal parts bone-chilling, wryly funny, and deeply political, Midnight Timetable is a masterful work of literary horror from one of our time's greatest imaginations.

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I’m fascinated by the set-up of this – multiple ghost stories that tie together into one big story? Yes please, I want to see what that looks like!

The Captive by Kit Burgoyne
Genres: Adult, Horror
Goodreads

A darkly comedic, cinematic horror about a revolutionary group who kidnap an heiress, only to discover she's pregnant with the antichrist, and she's about to give birth.
From Ned Beauman, the Man Booker Prize longlisted author of The Teleportation Accident and Clarke Award winning author of Venomous Lumpsucker. Perfect for fans of Grady Hendrix and Joe Hill.
Underground revolutionary group, The Nail, and their newest member, Luke have kidnapped 23-year-old heiress Adeline Woolsaw, whose wealthy parents run the Woolsaw Group, a vast outsourcing company. They run everything from prisons and hospitals to military bases – quietly suffocating the country with the help of powerful friends in government.
The Nail's to use the kidnapping to draw attention to the Woolsaw Group and their terrible practices. But with Adeline bundled into their van, The Nail discover two things. The first is that she's just about to give birth. And the second is that this isn't a normal baby. In fact, it has devastating supernatural powers. Because the father of this baby wasn't a man, it was… something else. Something that her parents make human sacrifices to on an altar in the basement of their Highgate mansion. And all this time the Woolsaw Group has been preparing the ground for the Woolsaws' real an infernal new kingdom that will rise with Adeline's son sitting on its throne.

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This one was just released this week, and since I have a morbid fascination with antichrists and other supernaturally-Wrong pregnancies/kids stories, it’s one I’ve been excited for!

Out for Blood by John Peyton Cooke
Genres: Adult, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Gay MC
Goodreads

An avid reader of Dracula and a fan of old Hammer horror films, Chris Callaway has always fantasized about becoming a vampire—and the idea of immortality is even more alluring now that he has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. So when a vampire appears at his apartment and offers him eternal life as one of the undead, Chris jumps at the opportunity. But unexpected terrors await him in the world of the night. A new enemy, relentless and insatiable, is hunting vampires for his own evil purposes. And unless Chris can stop him, he will face a fate even worse than death ... One of the few gay-themed novels of the horror publishing boom of the ’80s and ’90s, John Peyton Cooke’s groundbreaking and tremendously entertaining Out for Blood (1991) returns to print at last in this edition, which includes a new afterword by the author.

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I think I came across this one while looking into the indie press publishing Vincent Virga’s Gaywyck Quartet (which is Gothic, so arguably Horror, and which you should read if you haven’t already!) Out For Blood is an old-school queer vampire book, so I’d be intrigued by that alone, but I also like the tagline: the night spawns a hideous evil even the undead fear. A monster even vampires are scared of? I’m in!

To You Shall All Flesh Come (Honoré Sloane, #1) by Lumen Reese
Genres: Adult, Horror
Goodreads

A brilliant Chief of Surgery and his team ensnare vampires, harvest their organs to donate or sell on the black market, then tag them like sharks and release them back into the wild. Encased within the 'pacetaker' attached to the heart are a toothpick and a monitor of the levels of human blood in the vampire's system. Their levels rise too high, and they get death by toothpick. It's a barbaric new method to keep vampires docile. Apparently, they've been on the honor system this whole time...

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THIS IS SUCH A COOL, FUCKED-UP IDEA!

The Church of the Mountain of Flesh by Kyle Wakefield
Genres: Adult, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Trans MC
Goodreads

THE CHURCH OF THE MOUNTAIN OF FLESH is a cosmic horror novel about mad artists, bodies spiralling out of control, and a trans man's merciless desperation.

Sole De Gasinis drowns his grief in wine and buries his hatred of his body in twisted sculptures. When, one drunken night on the beach, God orders him to rebuild his village's church, he knows he wasn't chosen for his piety.

Instead, he and God make a deal. If Sole rebuilds the church, God will give him the body of a man.

As Sole works in a frenzy for salvation, lifelong friendships decay, a village united to tear down its church fractures into pariahs and zealots, and power and grief reshape the prophet into a tyrant. Grief for a boy he fell in love with ten years ago, who claimed to be a virgin birth, who died in agony in the church crypt when the God inside him wanted out -- and whose monstrous remnant Sole must commune with for every piece of his prize.

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This has been on my tbr for FREAKING AGES – longer than any other book on this list, easily! – and I really need to get to it already!

Hinterland by Logan Spurgeon
Genres: Adult, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Queer MC
Published on: 6th December 2025
Goodreads

Kestrel awakes in the woods without a real name or his memories. Before him are twelve strangers, an altar on fire, and bones hanging from the trees like wind chimes. He’s to be initiated into their group so they may fulfill their purpose: head to the mountain of the so-called gods, have a feast, and bring about the end of the world. Kestrel is willing to risk it all to escape, but without any memories, he knows he must play along until he finds a way out.

It won’t be easy. Winter is on their heels, hunters are searching for them, and the strange rituals they perform will rip his humanity from his flesh. But Kestrel isn’t alone. One of the strangers claims to be his friend from before, and there are others willing to join his side and leave the wilderness... if the gods let them.

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I just got approved for an arc of this, and I’m very hopeful – old gods! Some kind of cult-thing that wants to end the world! And missing memories, which is a trope that is most excellent in the right hands!

Corrupted Vessels by Briar Ripley Page
Genres: Adult, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Queer MC
Goodreads

With CORRUPTED VESSELS, Briar Ripley Page takes hold of the alienation, placelessness, desire, and need to belong [that haunts] the queer world and slowly sculpts [the characters] into something at once disturbing and achingly familiar; a story about the people we throw away and the dreams [we] cling to in order to survive.
-Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

Southern Gothic meets surrealism, CORRUPTED VESSELS is a story about terrifying angels, messy realities, and queer life on the margins. [ Volume includes a previously unpublished standalone novelette called NEW EDEN.]

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Like Out For Blood, this one made it onto my radar because I was checking out the publisher – tRaum Books, who published one of my favourite books and who I got to work with on a copy-editing project! Corrupted Vessels jumped out at me from their catalogue, and after talking a lot with the editor about the kind of books he wants to publish, I’m expecting to adore this one!

Have you read any of these? Do you have any spooky reads lined up for the season? Let me know!

The post 10 Horror-y Reads On My Autumn TBR appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

It’s been a rough month, my friends. Putting it under a spoiler tag because it’s definitely a downer. Trigger warning for mentions of cancer, dementia, implied parental abuse, and doggie health scares (the dog is fine!) If you do read under the spoiler, I am okay and don’t want to talk about any of it. I already know you’re all lovely enough to wish me well <3

[View post to see spoiler]

This all made it much harder to read than usual, but at least what I did read was great!

ARCs Received

The Flowers I Deserve is the newest novel from Tamara Jerée, whose debut The Fall That Saved Us I adored. Poison-girls being Extremely Queer – yes please!

Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur caught my eye with that fabulous cover, but I initially wasn’t going to request an arc – just pick it up when it was released. But then I saw it was in the lgbt+ category on Netgalley! So yes, I pounced MOST GLEEFULLY.

And I’m desperately hoping that Gollancz, who’s publishing it in the UK, hasn’t done the editing (because they’re fucking abominable at it) but there was no way I could resist The Wolf and His King!

The Gods Must Burn features a bi man becoming a god after he sacrifices himself to save some wolf cubs – can you say hells fucking yes??? Plus it’s from Rebellion, and while I don’t always love their books, they do consistently publish outside-the-box stuff that’s usually worth taking a peek at!

Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die is one I’ve been hearing great things about, and I’m hoping it’ll end up one of next year’s Unmissables. Same with City of Others!

Whereas We Dance Upon Demons wasn’t on my radar at all – I had no idea Vaishnavi Patel had a new book in the works! – but using magic to defend an abortion centre against pro-forced-birthers??? That sounds so cool!

Artifact Space is the US edition of one of my favourite books, and I’m intensely curious about whether any editing’s been done (the UK edition was by Gollancz, and is chock-full of everything from typos to continuity errors).

Read

18 books read this month! A fair bit less than last month’s 25 reads, but considering what a mess this month was I’m actually very positively surprised.

Nine-Tenths was a wonderful love story that refused to be just one thing; extremely outside the box in all the ways! The Summer War delighted me too – despite the premise it gave me so much joy! But the unquestionable stand-out this month was Eight Doors From Dawn to Midnight, Rachel Neumeier’s newest fantasy. GOING STRAIGHT ON THE FOREVER-FAVOURITES LIST, HOLY WOW. Extravagantly beautiful and strange and thinky with fantastic characters and super-unique worldbuilding and magic! Literally flawless.

I reread the rest of the Rivers of London series this month – well, the novels, anyway – which were really great when I was grey-brained. Alas, I didn’t really love the newest instalment, Stone & Sky – adored Abigail’s plotline, but a lot of the rest of it made me twitch.

DNF-ed

18 DNFs in September – which is a new record, damn it. GAH. (An equal number of books read and books DNFed – does that mean anything?) Quite a few of these were great but just not for me – Herculine, Lost Reliquary, and Philosophy of Thieves in particular – and Overgrowth especially I want to try again later.

Reviewed

Honestly, given everything going on, I’m amazed I managed two reviews. And they weren’t terrible, either!

Next Up

The sequel to Witch King is out in a WEEK and I haven’t started my reread yet; and I was about to reread the UK edition of Artifact Space before I was approved for the arc of the US edition, so that feels wonderfully appropriate! Reigncloud Palace is a cosy fantasy about someone who repairs magical items and has been on my tbr for ages; Captive just came out today, and I’m SO EXCITED to finally be able to pounce on it! In Solitude’s Shadow is one I spotted on bluesky, and the author was kind enough to send me a copy (it was free on the Big River site, but I can’t buy through them any more because of this bs). It’s supposed to be queer Epic Fantasy and I’m really hoping it delights me!

ARCs Outstanding

I was hoping and planning to get through a chunk of these this month, but it was not to be!

Unmissable SFF Updates

The Unmissable list for next year got some covers added, and now has 24 books! And after realising I’d somehow managed to include one book twice, this year’s list is 81 books long!

How did my predictions/anticipated reads for September go? I declared five books Unmissable for this month, and–

two were five-star reads (Audition For the Fox and Summer War)one was a two-star read (A Blood as Bright as the Moon)one was a DNF (Sunward)one I haven’t finished yet (Angel Maker)

Honestly Audition and Summer War were both so freaking awesome that they easily make up for the others.

Misc

This month my interview with Martin Cahill, author of Audition For the Fox, went live! He was such an incredible person to talk to, I had so much fun.

I’m genuinely not sure whether or not I can mark Neveryóna by Samuel R Delany as read or not – I got so fucking frustrated with it I skimmed a lot, so do I count it as a DNF or read?

The copy-editing for tRaum Books was wrapped up early this month, so was complete before everything came off the rails. Thank the gods. I’m really proud of the work I did, and collaborating with the editor there was a JOY. If I thought there was any chance I could make a sane amount of money doing it, I’d set up as a self-employed copy-editor in a heartbeat!

Looking Forward

October is EASILY the most exciting book-release month this year! New books from Nghi Vo, Alix E Harrow, Martha Wells, Freya Marske, Tamara Jerée, AND Hiron Ennes! A sequel to Bored Gay Werewolf! THE NEXT ARCANA IMPERII BOOK! If you don’t hear from me until November, THESE’LL BE WHY!

May we all have a most optimal October!

The post In Short: September appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Nine-Tenths by J.M. Frey
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: M/M
PoV: First-person, present-tense
Published on: 30th September 2025
ISBN: 1738148556
Goodreads

Colin Levesque is at loose ends. He's finished university, but has no career; he adores romance novels, but he's crap at relationships; and his prickliness is a detriment at the café where he's making ends meet. He also has a crush on his regular Dav, a homo draconis who comes in every morning to read his newspaper, sip his double-strong coffee, and stare longingly at Colin in return.

So it figures that the day Colin gets up the courage to do something about the sexual tension simmering between them, he also learns that Dav has an embarrassing habit of hiccupping fire when he's nervous. Which, in this case, destroys the fancy custom-made bean roaster. When Dav volunteers to take over the coffee roasting with his fire-breath, being squished together in the hot, cramped kitchen leads to even hotter kisses.

Everything's finally happening for Colin—until people start claiming the dragon-roasted coffee has cured their genetic ailments. As their budding relationship struggles under the scrutiny of scientists and media, the hype around the coffee leads the lovers to be inducted into a centuries-old conspiracy: dragon-roasted food has always healed humans. And the most powerful draconic nobles have been withholding this symbiotic advantage to keep themselves on top. Colin and Dav are determined to expose the truth, but if they're not careful, their objections could goad power-mad monarchs into destroying everything they hold dear.

Including each other.

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I received this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~dragons are watching your social media
~chocolate allergy BEGONE
~brain weasels begone also
~in hindsight I’m embarrassed the title confused me
~whatever genre you think this is, you’re wrong

This isn’t exactly what it looks like, and that DELIGHTED me!

The synopsis already does a good job at alerting you that Nine-Tenths isn’t especially conventional: it’s a Coffee Shop (not-)AU, in a contemporary fantasy setting, with (shapeshifting) dragons, and a queer romance. But, it’s also a mystery – a mystery which leads into a capitalist conspiracy – and uncovering that is going to be world-changing.

ALL OF THIS IS ON THE BACK OF THE BOOK.

But this is Frey, who as far as I can tell has never cared about making her stories fit in neat little boxes – so Nine-Tenths is a good bit more than that, too. The romance took several turns that had my jaw on the floor. There’s political intrigue. There’s mental health. It even digs into environmentalism and the Land Back movement!

THIS BOOK IS AS TWISTY AS A SNAKY DRAGON, IS WHAT I’M SAYING HERE.

Colin is adorable, and far too relatable – a Millennial with anxiety, a Most Excellent friend group, and no idea wtf to do with his life. He is also very into Mills & Boon-style romances, and I loved how that influenced his narration – there are moments where he breaks the fourth wall to explain to the reader that this is the point in a romance where such and such typically happens, or perhaps that other thing, and maybe it would get annoying if he were doing it constantly, but as it was, it tickled me pink.

There’s this thing in stories called “the inciting incident.”

And mine? It’s a goddamn doozy.

Dav is, uh. Far less relatable. Because he is, in fact, a dragon. Albeit one who spends most of his time in human form (which seems to be the norm for dragons in this setting). This is perhaps the first of Frey’s surprises for the reader – because although it looks very, very like ours, Colin’s world is in fact ruled by dragons. And humans know this and are fine with it. Possibly because the dragons stay out of most people’s day-to-day lives, very deliberately obscuring exactly how much power and control they have over humanity. Which is something Colin runs into face-first after the events of the synopsis go down, because dragons REALLY don’t want everyone to know that they could cure every one of humanity’s ills and just…don’t.

He thought humans should rule humans.”

“That’s stupid,” I chuckle. “It never works. Hello, look at America. They had a whole failed revolution about it.”

I mean, understandably? I would be upset. I imagine most other people would be, too. Especially after Covid, which is over in Colin’s world (I’m jealous) but left Colin in particular wrecked after his dad died of it.

Nine-Tenths packs a lot of different genres into its pages, but it is primarily a romance, and whether that romance will work for you or not…is going to vary, I think. Because Dav is not exactly the Perfectly Unproblematic love interest; he’s not, thankfully, the kind of Toxically Masculine hero we get in, say, Paranormal Romances, but if you have hang-ups about love interests not disclosing really important shit, then you – like me! – may be unhappy with our Dav. This sort of thing would usually have me defenestrating a book, but two important details made it work instead: first, Frey is very, very good at making you believe that Dav really does have good intentions and is not trying to be an ass. I was never in any doubt that Dav really and truly loved Colin to the ends of the earth and back again, even when I wanted to toss him off a cliff. (He has wings, he’d be fine!)

I had spoken.

And he had listened.

I had dreamed.

And he had made it a reality.

The second point is…a little hard to explain, but critical.

I think – I worry! – that some readers are going to be nonplussed by the way in which Colin doesn’t react to A Terrible Thing. The Thing is obviously, objectively bad. But Colin seems to shrug it off – even to himself, in the privacy of his head, he doesn’t freak out the way he very clearly should. But this is so freaking believable! This IS how people (don’t) react to Really Bad Things, a lot of the time! Because The Thing is so completely inconceivable that it becomes ridiculous, it doesn’t register as real, not on an emotional level. Instead there’s shock, and incomprehension, and the kind of reflexive justification/rationalisation/dismissal that a lot of us do when our loved ones do something that we can’t make sense of. Most people would just…carry on, until something caused the reality of the situation to smack them in the face. So you don’t burst into tears, or start throwing things, or yelling. Because it doesn’t feel real, yet, even though you know it is.

And also…there’s a…not very rational element to romantic love, quite often. If my partner pulled what Colin did… I’m not saying I wouldn’t care, but I wouldn’t freak out the way I probably should because it’s this person specifically. To whom the normal rules do not apply, when we get right down to it. I think the same thing is at play between Dav and Colin. And that’s why I found Colin’s (not-)reaction so believable, so relatable. It makes no sense on any kind of rational level, I get that, but in context, on an emotional level, I don’t struggle for a second to understand why Colin stays so calm. It’s because he loves Dav far more than is rational, reasonable, or safe.

He should be running for the hills. But it makes perfect emotional sense that he doesn’t. And it’s only luck, really, that that doesn’t end incredibly badly for him.

Moments like this one, where we were both still sleep-muzzy and warm, it feels like I might overflow, like there’s no way I’ll ever find room for all of this…all of this. But maybe I’ll expand, somehow, to hold it all under my skin, close to my heart. I’m Dav’s ground, and his gravity, and his center. And he’s my air, and my laughter, and my heat.

(Except, it’s not really luck, is it? Because it’s not random. Colin decides he can live with this specifically because it’s Dav – because he trusts Dav. And he has reason to trust Dav, Dav has earned it. Colin doesn’t flip a coin to determine whether or not he’s okay with all this; he decides, based on his experience and knowledge of the man he loves. And I guess he could have been wrong – but he wasn’t. His idea of who Dav is was correct. That’s not luck, is it? That’s – knowing someone well enough to trust them, I think.)

There are also contextual mitigating factors, which are crucial in keeping this the kind of glittery, joyful romance that it is, instead of something much darker. Basically, dragons are wired in such a way that this Deeply Problematic Thing they do is okay, really, mostly, because…they do it with genuine adoration and love? Or put another way: it’s Deeply Problematic when humans do it to each other. It’s…less dodgy when a dragon does it to a human? Or, no wait, let me try again: within the relationship, the couple, human and dragon – between them, everything is perfect. The Deeply Dodgy Thing is only in how other dragons perceive the relationship. It’s not the relationship that’s fucked, it’s…how it’s viewed by outsiders…?

This is so hard to talk about without spoilers, GODS.

If you can’t accept what Dav does, and that Colin is okay with it, and that this is despite that a True Love story – then Nine-Tenths isn’t going to work for you. But I think Frey does a really excellent job at convincing us of their love, and convincing us that yes, it really is the huge, all-consuming, ridiculous love that would make people let something like this go. It’s not just that I have experienced that myself; I was convinced that Colin felt it too. Not every writer can pull that off – I’ve definitely seen times where it’s failed, and you probably have too – but this isn’t the first time Frey’s done so; her book Lips Like Ice, written under another penname, hinged on the same thing, on her ability to convince us that the characters felt something deeply not safe, sane and consensual for each other. Not obsession; nothing as simple as obsession. Love doesn’t have to be obsessive to be…not-logical?

I don’t know how else to put it. But if you haven’t felt it in your own life, I think Frey will make you feel it here, between these two characters.

I’m making this book sound so much more fucked-up than it is, I swear! It’s not like that (even if, objectively, it probably should be!) Nine-Tenths made me GLITTER. That sparkly, bubbly, giggly feeling you get while reading the best kind of romances? I felt that the whole way through reading this book. It’s FUN, even though it’s tackling a myriad of serious topics. Colin goes into a proper depressive spiral at one point; the story digs into (the tip of) colonialism; there’s creepy totalitarian/Big Brother stuff with the dragons controlling so much more than the humans think they do. And so on. And yet, despite all of that, I was having fun.

“That’s just the brain weasels talking.”

The resolution depended a little too heavily on some neat coincidences and the villain being abominably stupid at a crucial moment, but not so badly that it broke my immersion in the story. And…those are really my only critiques. It’s not just that Nine-Tenths is really fun, a book that elicits that incredible glitter-glee that Romance is always chasing – it’s also the twistiness of the plot, how Frey consistently declined to take the story in the directions genre-conventions have us expect. Sometimes this was extremely dramatic and jaw-dropping; sometimes it was much quieter and subtler; but it’s always, in a word, awesome. I had to laugh several times when the story flipped the tables on me and what kind of story I thought this was: from Contemporary to Contemporary Fantasy, to Cli Fi, to [View post to see spoiler], to Political Intrigue (Land Back), to Political Intrigue (Elizabethan) – it was just REALLY GREAT to read a story unabashedly colouring outside the lines, one where I couldn’t predict WHAT was going to happen on the next page, never mind the next chapter!

That could have felt messy and disjointed, but it didn’t – Frey’s too good for that. Despite playing hopscotch with genre Nine-Tenths is wonderfully cohesive; it feels twisty in the way that real life is twisty, where curveballs can come from outside your frame of reference but not outside your reality. The world fits together so well that it supports even the most unexpected reveals – it’s always ‘oh, yeah, I can believe this world would do that/have that’, not ‘wtf is this now?!’

And ultimately? I love Colin. I LOVE him. He is wonderful. He is a mess and he is funny and he cares so much and he’s SMART and he’s a romantic and he is Fierce and he COMMUNICATES LIKE A GROWN-UP, and does Dav deserve him??? In my humble opinion, no, Dav doesn’t – but Dav means well, he is so intensely and unquestionably earnest and genuine, and he makes Colin happy, so we’ll allow it.

I loved this book. It surprised and delighted me from start to finish; it made me laugh so much; every single character, down to the most minor, felt fleshed-out and fully alive; it gave me all the glitter-glee I could possibly ask for. It made me ache and flail and rage and kick my feet, and I teared up more than once. I’ve highlighted so many wonderful lines. I can already tell I’m going to reread this over and over, whenever I want something that makes me feel fizzy and joyful. It’s going directly onto my Best of Year list, and a has a forever-spot on my Faves shelf.

TL;DR: The tagline says ‘love is a treasure worth hoarding’, and SO IS THIS BOOK!

And if you still need convincing, you can read the first five chapters here!

The post A Non-Stop Rollercoaster of Delight: Nine-Tenths by J.M. Frey appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted over at Wishful Endings to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about but haven’t yet read. Most of the time they’re books that have yet to be released, but not always. It’s based on the Waiting on Wednesday meme, which was originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine. 

You can find the releases I’m most anticipating this year over on my Unmissable list, but I use Can’t-Wait Wednesday to feature books I’m hopeful about but aren’t 100% sure will be five star reads.

This week my Can’t-Wait-For Book is The Witch Who Chases the Sun by Dawn Chen!

The Witch Who Chases the Sun by Dawn Chen
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Chinese-inspired cast and setting, F/F
Published on: 1st October 2025
Goodreads

Sometimes, true love is not the answer.

A decade after the Second War, Aixauhan Alchemist Ying Cai-Li seeks to rekindle her relationship with her ex-lover, the Inabrian Oracle Anne Barberry.

However, the war changed them both. Estranged by their losses, Cai-Li has gained a notorious reputation as the dark magic-wielding Blood Hawk and Anne barricades herself in a castle on a hill where her family’s dark secrets lie. Rumors in the village say Anne is a monster, responsible for the disappearance of innocent visitors.

But when the two witches reunite and begin unraveling the mysteries of the village, it becomes clear that scars left by the war do not easily fade. Things are not as they seem. Old ghosts come back to haunt them. Past truths are revealed. Can the witches be each other’s salvations or are they doomed to repeat the past that tore them apart?

Fans of The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang and The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon will fall in love with Dawn Chen’s sapphic high fantasy epic about anti-colonialism, grief, generational trauma, and the cycles of war.

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I mean…look at that synopsis: which part am I NOT supposed to be excited about? Two messed-up, very-not-NiceTM witches having to deal with their trauma together! With lots of tangled, thorny themes! (…I actually didn’t mean for that to alliterate, but I’m keeping it.)

Some of the early reviewers have mentioned that not only are there multiple magic systems, but that they draw influence from Chinese and British mythology. Which – I always love when we have more than one kind of magic that humans can practice, but I’m not sure I’ve often seen multiple systems with such wildly different influences! Probably the British-esque magic is going to be tied up with the anti-colonial theme?

This post from the publisher also promises an ‘unconventional happily ever after’, which, GIMME! I’m not holding my breath that the two characters won’t be romantically together at the end, whatever the blurb is trying to imply – and honestly, by the time I get to the end I’ll probably want them to be happily together. But I would really, really like a happy ending that doesn’t look like a thousand others I’ve seen before. Just for variety’s sake!

This one is out NEXT WEEK – not long to wait now!

The post I Can’t Wait For…The Witch Who Chases the Sun by Dawn Chen appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

The Thread That Binds (Eternal Library #1) by Cedar McCloud
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Nonbinary aromantic asexual MC; nonbinary asexual MC; brown pansexual MC; queerplatonic NB/NB; NB/F; secondary NB/NB
PoV: First-person, present-tense; multiple PoVs
ISBN: B0DWVSBJSW
Goodreads

The books are restless. At the Eternal Library, books are more than the paper, ink, and thread they're made from--they're full of spirits. Only a handful of people will ever be invited to the Bindery to learn the craft of etheric bookbinding: the creation of intricate illuminated manuscripts, Bound with a secret that will make them last forever.

Tabby is a dreamwalker, a witch who escapes into the stories of sleep to avoid a birth family that's never loved em enough. Amane is a cartomancer, a medium who speaks for the Unseen, but doesn't know how to speak for her own needs. Rhiannon is highly psychic, an archivist who can See into the past, but only has eyes on the future.

Their stories intertwine as they discover the secrets of etheric binding, the Library's archives, and those of their mentors--the three of whom are competing to be the next Head Librarian, the Speaker for all the books. How do you know who's truly worth being part of your family? Sometimes we must forge connections in order to heal; other times, those bonds must be broken.

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~making magic books!
~what if libraries were a religion
~ghosts are quite chatty actually
~divination and dream-walking
~many original fairytales

Cedar McCloud is an author I first discovered through their artwork back when they were working on their stunning Numinous Tarot (still one of my favourite decks!) Later, when they were creating their Threadbound Oracle, I followed that project too – and was VERY intrigued when they revealed that they had written a novel inspired by and entwined with the oracle! I backed both when they came to Kickstarter, obviously.

Alas, I bounced off Thread That Binds a few times. But then the New Voices book club on r/Fantasy chose it as their read for August this year, so I tried again – and was completely hooked!

I’m never 100% sure what cozy fantasy means, but plenty of others have said Thread That Binds falls under that category, so that should give you an idea of what you’re in for here. There’s no saving-the-world plot, but the stakes certainly feel high for all our characters, and I spent a lot of the book much more anxious than I thought I’d be! But there’s a lovely unhurried pace to most of it, a dreamy kind of sweetness; I used Thread That Binds as a bedtime book, something to read while winding down for the night, and that worked wonderfully (aside from a few of the more nail-biting chapters here and there!)

Some quick worldbuilding, for context: the world of the Threadverse is a fantasy one, but it has a similar level of technology to ours, with magical equivalents of mobile phones and the internet and the like. Thread That Binds is set in the country Caspora, which has no concept of gender and everyone uses e/em pronouns by default; only a very rare few, and immigrants from elsewhere, use other pronouns. Caspora houses the world-famous Eternal Library, which is pretty much what it sounds like: a magical library that seeks to house and preserve a copy of every book ever written. A tiny but sacred department within the Library is the Bindery, where the rare, very magical, and indestructible Illuminated books are created by hand. The only way to learn Illumination is via a long and secretive apprenticeship, and apprenticeships don’t come along very often.

But one of the Illuminators has decided it’s time to take on an apprentice, and Tabby (e/em) and Amane (she/her) are both interviewing for the spot in the opening chapters. It’s an even bigger deal than it would otherwise be, because while most Illuminators leave for other libraries after their apprenticeships, whoever gets this one will gain a permanent position at the Eternal Library – the dream of every would-be Illuminator. Rhiannon (e/em), Tabby’s platonic partner, already works at the Eternal Library as an archivist, and gets bumped up to Assistant Head Archivist when the previous one quits – meaning e now works directly for and with Mairead, the charismatic, mercurial Head Archivist.

The book switches between Tabby, Amane and Rhiannon’s PoVs, and McCloud does an excellent job at giving each of them a distinctive voice and perspective on life, each other, and the Library. Tabby is a dreamwalker who struggles with stress-induced narcolepsy, the child of dysfunctional parents; e and Rhiannon live together as platonic partners. Rhiannon has what seems like a stronger, maybe more abrasive personality; e protects Tabby from Tabby’s parents as much as possible, but has eir own insecurities around having been a Gifted Child who feels e has little to show for it – and is very unsensitive to magic, which makes em blind to much of what makes the Eternal Library such a special place. Amane is an intense perfectionist, who uses the oracle deck handed down through her family to access her psychic abilities; she’s also not a native of Caspora, and has to adjust to the language and culture of her new home a fair bit.

A huge part of the story is not just the relationships between the three protagonists, but also each of their relationships with their respective mentors. Tabby apprentices with Binder Aeronwy; Amane with another Binder, and Aeronwy’s spouse, June; and Rhiannon is taken under the wing of eir boss, Mairead. Aeronwy and June both work hard, in their different styles, to connect with their apprentices and help them grow both as Binders and as individuals; Mairead, on the other hand, is deeply manipulative and toxic, good at twisting scenarios and words so that nothing is ever eir fault. Which is pretty ironic, considering that Mairead is a priestex of a religion that believes people are characters in a divine story – and that some people are protagonists, while others are npcs. (There’s a level of meta there that feels delightfully tongue-in-cheek!) Mairead is sure that e is a protagonist…and yet, somehow, nothing that happens could ever be a consequence of eir own actions. E is always done to, never doing. Sounds pretty npc to me!

Mairead is the kind of small-scale villain who is unfortunately believable, and who made my skin crawl whenever e appeared; I suspect most readers will have at least brushed up against similar personalities, and it’s easy to see how Rhiannon gets as twisted up as e does by Mairead’s charisma and poisonous promises. The other pitfalls of the story are equally familiar, and just as authentic: Tabby’s struggles with eir parents, in particular, made me sick with tension even while my heart was breaking for em. On the flip side, the friendships forming between the main characters also rang true; they felt very organic, and low-key, in a way that I really liked. All of them grew over the course of the book; I wouldn’t call this a coming-of-age story, but the vibe reminded me of university, that point in your life when you’re legally an adult but still figuring out who you are and how to be a grown up – full of possibility, but also kinda terrifying.

Thread That Binds gets right what a lot of cosy fantasy seems to get wrong: the stakes are low, relatively speaking, but very high for the characters – and McCloud writes the tension of that really, really well. Sure, the villain is fairly obvious, and the gentleness of the book means you’re never in any doubt that the main characters will triumph. But neither of those kept McCloud from playing my emotions like a fiddle. I didn’t think I was going to get sucked into this; I thought it would be something to read when my brain was misbehaving, or right before bed. Instead, I ended up obsessed, and I’m still not sure how that happened!

The world McCloud’s created is quietly magical, a believable attempt at mortals building a utopia. (Meaning, not actually perfect, but a good try.) The magic reminded me a lot of Wiccan-esque magic, with lots of visualisation and minimal cinematics, the mechanics vague. It felt fairly mundane, to be honest, which is partly a reflection of how normalised magic is in this setting; there’s very little sense of it being anything unusual or special, most of the time. There are several faiths, with tensions between them; historical figures who are deities in one country but viewed as mortals in another. The dead aren’t gone forever; Amane speaks with, or for, ghosts all the time, and not only through her divination cards. There’s virtually no physical violence in this setting – but equally, that does mean that when there is, most people have no idea how to deal with it, and they struggle to deal with non-physical violence just as much as we do in our world. There’s magic-internet, and magic-social media, even. Given the cultural and global importance of the Eternal Library, there’s a great deal of book imagery worked into everything from religion to speech, which was a constant delight for me as a bookwyrm.

And of course, there’s Caspora’s lack of gender. I was frustrated by how much I struggled with this; not because of the way it’s written – I think it’s written very well! But even being nonbinary, which I am, doesn’t mean you’re automatically Enlightened enough to stop reflexively gendering people, and I had to struggle not to do that based on names and context clues. But that just made Thread That Binds good practice for me! McCloud’s approach to this was as realistic and believable as their utopia; instead of creating a nation of androgynous people, McCloud’s characters gleefully mix-and-match what we’d think of as gender markers; beards and dresses are a common combination, for example. I loved this so much, because yes! The vast majority of nonbinary people aren’t androgynous in real life, and well-meaning allies don’t seem to realise what they’re implying when they write all their enby characters that way. McCloud instead works from the premise that none of these things have anything to do with gender; beards aren’t masculine, they’re just beards. Dresses aren’t feminine, they’re just dresses. Or perhaps they are masculine and feminine, but if they are then they don’t necessarily reflect the gender of the person wearing them. It’s a depiction that’s a breath of fresh air, honestly, and I’d like a lot of other storytellers to be taking notes, please!

The prose is quite simple, but each of the characters bring so much feeling and sincerity to their narration that the fairly straightforward writing didn’t bother me. Tabby and Amane and Rhiannon all felt so genuine – both in the sense that they’re incredibly easy to believe in, with the sorts of hopes and cares that are extremely familiar – but also in the sense of being…open and honest with the reader? That sounds ridiculous, but I don’t know how else to say what I mean. I felt that I knew these characters better than I’m used to knowing characters, that I knew them more deeply and completely than your typical protagonist. I can’t figure out how McCloud pulled that off, but it was wonderful!

The climax was probably the weakest part of the book – Tabby and Amane have to go through magical trials alongside their mentors, and the trials themselves made almost no sense to me, besides being pretty boring to read about. But that didn’t really matter, because I wasn’t really here for the big plot, I was here for the characters, who I adored, and the writing that soothed my brain-fizz and got me right in the Feels.

Thread That Binds…is like being hugged. Sometimes tighter, sometimes more loosely; sometimes rocking you gently, sometimes jumping up and down with excitement. I don’t know how else to put it.

I loved it, and can’t wait to dive into the next book in the series!

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