Quartzen > Recent Status Updates

Adding trigger warnings for rape bordering on themes of childhood sexual assault and incest to this, context follows with spoilers. Amber has a vision through the rapist's eyes, a faery who positioned herself as the queen's lover, raised the prince to his teens(?), became obsessed with him, and slept with both in different disguises until the queen sees through her illusion; the faery curses him to become the Beast.

There's an appealing domesticity in many Beauty and the Beast retellings as well as narrative space for art and craft: Amber's perfumes here, Bryony's gardening and the Beast's clockwork in Bryony and Roses, Mirasol's beekeeping in Chalice, frequently of course the great library as well for research or for leisure. The confined setting and small cast removes many other options for plot progression and for conflict.

Moving along. About 10% away from where my e-reader had noticed I'd stopped before. So far, a solid retelling with some secondary world elements that I expect will come more to the fore later.

I'd tried to read this one before and drifted off at about the halfway point, going to give it another try I guess

I was in the mood for a Beauty and the Beast retelling, and I have a lot of them in my TBR as I have a mind to write one someday- I picked this one out because I liked her Snow Queen retelling. I'm not sure the narrative voice in this one is working for me- the whimsy and jokes are falling a bit flat and I found the toilet humor eye-rolling at best- but I liked the Beast and the gardening elements have promise.

Enjoying this one a lot and realizing that I'm so much more invested in the parts of this universe that aren't Surebleak or the Bedel (an especial dislike, they feel like such a lazy stereotype it has held me back from recommending the series to others) than those parts which have had heavy focus for the last several books, it feels like a relief to have a new book without them

This is an aftermath book, I love aftermath books! There is a lot of processing of the events of Alliance of Equals as well as earlier in the series. Maybe next year I'll do a full read through from the beginning, I am curious how the sequence from Dragon in Exile through this book will read all together instead of spaced apart.

I started reading the series with Conflict of Honors (in the out of print Meisha Merlin omnibus Partners in Necessity) and Shan and the Dutiful Passage crew have always been my favorites, so I splurged on the e-ARC from Baen for this one (it will be released in December). Continuity-wise, it picks up fairly directly after Alliance of Equals, concurrent with the last few published books.

I keep thinking about how different from current writing advice norms this series is as I'm reading this entry. There are so many opportunities for thing to go spectacularly, stake-escalatingly, body-count-accumulatingly wrong, but for the most part they don't. The worst _doesn't_ always happen for the characters, because Cherryh finds interest in a society with a different status quo as much as one in crisis.

Still plugging away at this one...

"_Love_ was assuredly not in it, but certainly attraction was." I've been a bit frustrated with the amount of recap in this series in the last few entries, with Bren's internal rumination almost getting to the point of parody as the time scale of each novel shrinks and shrinks, but if this one is going to maybe hand me more evidence for my reading of the series as an aromantic allosexual narrative I won't complain

I'm glad that last reveal was a misdirection (along with the tropes averted by it being so), but a little disappointed that my initial guess was right after all instead of some twist I hadn't guessed, and I'm not sure the actual villain's motivations make total sense to me- but the characters and their relationships are more of the draw than the mystery here anyways, I think

I feel like I'm missing something. Why exactly would the character revealed as the villain do all this...?

I started reading this one over the weekend but have been hesitant to track my progress on anything until I get at least halfway. This one started a bit in media res for my taste, but I've been liking it better as the worldbuilding explanations have been backfilled, and I'm quite curious to see how things get resolved

Complicated and meaningful friendships! A queer main character that feels like part of his world and community even when he doesn't feel like he fully fits in (_not_ because he's queer) and voluntarily chooses to leave! Continuing to enjoy this a lot. There is normalized casual sex, but it is not explicit at all- unless that drastically changes, and I doubt it will, I do not understand reviews complaining about smut?

Loving the narrative voice, the sense of place and daily life on the frozen world in this one

I love sequels about consequences, and this is so far all about the consequences of the dramatic conclusion of Witchmark

Quite enjoying this one so far

Need to enter several books I've read or reread for my Patreon, trying not to spoil what I'm going to review there for people who follow me in both places but it makes it harder to track my reading, oops! o.o

Oops, it seems like I forgot to put this one in my reading list when I started it earlier this year. I've been reading it in bits and pieces, and finding it a marked improvement over the previous books in the series even if it's not my favorite of Hogath's work

(Vaguely spoilery) I rather expected that would happen, but I'm still rather disappointed, book

So I guess that's probably why Yskandr didn't go home for so long then, huh

I confess, fancy party scenes fraught with intrigue are the way to my readerly heart

I think I have a book crush on Nineteen Adze, I hope she's not evil

Enjoying this as much as I'd hoped so far, it feels like a cross between Cherryh's Foreigner series, de Bodard's Xuya series, and Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy along but not in a derivative way, more just in that niche

Enjoying this one quite a bit so far, having gone in with minimal spoilers. A fascinating further iteration on the theme of the non-human with an attachment to humans from Ancillary Justice and sequels, but not in a way that feels derivative or repetitive.

I don't really know what to make of this one yet- organic AI, sentient trees, psychic warfare?

I do like a good surreal underworld journey. The pacing feels a bit odd, I felt like I never quite got a good grasp on what "normal" was like for Wasp up until this point despite the time we took to get to this point. I'm curious to see what happens next. Note for suicidal ideation in Chapter 5, for anyone who needs a note for that.

The book keeps setting aside Wasp's injuries or having her power through them in a way that I'm not sure that I would have noticed if I hadn't just read Defiant and Towers Fall which so resolutely refused to do that for their heroine, hm. I'm enjoying the slow exposition of Wasp's weird world a lot though, and I like her

I've been curious to compare this one to Radiant since they share a lot in common (postapocalyptic, central platonic relationships with ghosts)