Roundup: February 2024
Here’s my collection of shorter reviews for everything I read this February - I already feel bad because this was a less positive month than last month, but here goes:
Mastodon - Steve Sted - 3 ⭐⭐⭐
After reading a bunch of romance last month I decided to take a swerve into some creature horror. Do I know what a Mastodon is? No. Is the cover incredible? Yes. I’m not sure if I can articulate this well, but I’d say the content of this book is 15+, but the writing and storytelling makes it feel a very young YA. I spent most of the book being reminded of ‘Hatchet’ by Gary Paulsen. Seventeen years ago a woman went missing while camping in the forest with her husband and newborn son - in the present day the husband is in a plane crash that happens to land in the same forest. Their teenage son sneaks into the forest (now very un-suspiciously under military control) to try and find his father and everything after that is half hyper-realistic survival story and half horror/sci-fi monster story.
The mystery and the monsters are fascinating, and I really loved some of the horror imagery, but there’s something very juvenile about it - even for a teen character. While the survival portion of the story feels very authentic there’s a lot of suspension of disbelief required for later parts of the story. Lots of convenience, lots of things just working. The second half of the book feels like it’s in a rush to get itself over with, and so much happened so fast it didn’t feel like it had a great deal of weight. It also brings in a shade of Squid Game that feels really unnecessary? Added in purely for shock value? I don’t know, I just left it feeling disappointed more than anything else. Left wanting something more.
Devolution - Max Brooks - 4.5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐
I’ll be honest, I never read World War Z. I hate zombies, I hate zombie stories. Bigfoot however? And don’t get mad at me for telling you this is a Bigfoot story, because it’s said on page one. Devolution is told in retrospect, predominantly through the diary entries of one of the newest residents of an exclusive, secluded, technologically dependant community. We are told at the beginning that the people of this community have now vanished after the eruption of a nearby volcano, and no one knows exactly what happened to them or where they went. The diary entries are interspersed with current-day interviews with people involved in the volcano rescue and relief efforts, and between the two perspectives you start to piece together what happened.
I loved this book. I still think about it weeks later. I came to this story for the promise of Bigfoot, and absolutely loved that we got a bonus satire of Silicon Valley, Tech Bro, worldviews. I think this book is a few years old, but honestly the escapades of Musk et al have only gotten worse in the intervening years. The entire premise feels believable, the natural disaster and after effects are very grounded in reality, which then helps lends reality to the Bigfoot situation as it unfolds. We’re given quite a large cast of characters, most of whom we would very much like to watch suffer. And suffer they do! Alongside the (very unsubtle) commentary is very well paced horror, that doesn’t pull punches when it gets there. I love the main POV character, she’s flawed and naiive but she feels very human. Aside from her there’s three others I fell completely in love with - and even though the book tells you from the outset what happens to them, I still got to the end hoping for a different outcome. I genuinely cried at the end of a horror book about Bigfoot, colour me extremely impressed - I’d love to see more people talking about this one.
Ascension - Nicholas Binge - 3.75 ⭐⭐⭐
Bill Bailey used to do a skit about trying to read Stephen Hawking - read a few sentences about the theory of time, then stop and eat a biscuit to help process everything he’d just read. Ascension feels a lot like that. It ticks so many of my boxes - a group of scientists is assembled to go explore a mountain that appeared out of thin air. It combines all the real-life horror of mountaineering with scientific thought experiments and even delves into cosmic horror. It has a distinct air of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ to it, and I can’t deny that I found it absolutely fascinating to read, but it did sometimes feel like I just wasn’t smart enough to really take it in. It leans hard on the science - and I love the ideas it plays with - but that does make it a heavy book to work through.
Again, this is another story told through the form of letters between the protagonist and his niece, and there’s a lot of moving back and forth in the story trying to piece the events of the protagonists life together - past and present - all at once. I don’t think it’s outright stated, but the protagonist is extremely autistic-coded, which made him a really interesting perspective to read from. As someone with autism myself he read as very believable, and I could relate to some of his thought patterns. I don’t believe the author is neurodiverse but the character felt very authentic to me and I appreciated it. I find it difficult to recommend this book - it’s too much to recommend to someone just wanting a horror experience, and it feels more science than fiction. I think you need to go into it for the sci-fi and appreciate the horror when it happens, but this is not a bedtime read (unless you want a migraine), but I’m glad I stuck with it to the end.
The Maiden and the Unseen - Jeanette Rose & Alexis Rune - 2 ⭐⭐
I need to stop reading the books of people I like on social media, because I just get sad when I don’t like them as much as I like the person. This is a Hades/Persephone retelling (my favourite) with an interesting modern-esque setting. Some of the gods walk among us on Earth, living “mortal” lives financed by Hades. When Hades discovers an extra god has been hidden among the mortals he finds Persephone, who for some reason has been hidden from him specifically all her life. Probably because she almost certainly fits the prophecy of his future queen. This book is so odd. It’s very horny, which I absolutely don’t mind, but almost every character in it is so horny it makes them stupid. A lot of nothing happens, and what little plot happens feels bloated or contradicts the rules the characters have set themselves. Hades wants Persephone immediately. Persephone kind of wants Hades. Hades is really worried about this prophecy saying he’ll condemn his Queen to six months underground (even though he is also condemned to six months underground?) It’s very clear to the reader what’s going on, but the characters are just so frustratingly dense.
There’s a plotline dragged out about Persephone having a boyfriend already and refusing to break up with him because reasons, but also wanting to sleep with Hades. Hades refuses to sleep with her until she dumps her boyfriend. They almost immediately work around this by doing everything just short of penetrative sex, which apparently doesn’t challenge his stance on cheating. He doesn’t last more than a day or two after setting this boundary. The whole book is kind of like that - people not communicating, being extremely immature, immediately going back on what they said previously. It’s just a mess. I really liked the interpretation of Hades and Persephone’s non-human forms, but I don’t have a lot else positive to say. I think there are two more books in this series but I won’t be continuing.
Ruined Beauty - Cara Bianchi - 2⭐⭐
This is the start of my “I asked people for protective hero recommendations and got a bunch of half-arsed dark/fantasy romance books” arc. I’m not against dark romance, but after reading the next few books I’m slightly concerned about the quality levels of the subgenre. That’s such an awful thing to say, but it’s made me wonder how much of popular dark romance is popular just because it handles certain themes or taboos, and not so much because it’s well-written in it’s own right.
This was a very standard Mafia story. Mafia boss who needs a wife within a week sees a desperate girl, buys her from her financially desperate family, she teaches him the meaning of love and being human. It was fun and I genuinely liked the dynamic between the love interests, but it was quite predictable. It was nicely sexy, not much else to say. It was better than the next ones.
Viciously Yours - Jamie Applegate Hunter - 2 ⭐⭐
When a Fae king turns 13 he hears the name of his fated mate, fortunately in all the fantasy realms there’s only one girl called Amelia. Unfortunately she’s human and the King may not leave the Fae realm until he’s crowned (at 25). So from 13 onwards he starts using his friends and familiar to start spying on his fated mate, and sending her gifts once a year on her birthday, until the year he can finally come to claim her. I actually quite liked this world, and the premise is fun. As you can imagine, notes between thirteen year olds are more “apparently I’m going to love you one day, that’s disgusting.” It’s also very clear early on that one of the king’s friends is deliberately sabotaging his attempts to woo his mate.
It’s fairly by the numbers, the King is extremely territorial and jealous, so it’s all of those tropes. The “villain” of the piece is incredibly obvious and predictable, and it doesn’t change or develop at all as the story goes on. Then at the end of the book they suddenly bring in all these ridiculous revelations about the main characters and conveniently introduce the other kings of the other realms - and hint at their fated mates - to set up future books. Very forgettable.
Death’s Obsession - Avina St. Graves - 2⭐⭐
This one was going for something interesting but I’m not entirely sure it got there. A woman who is on a self-destructive spiral after the death of her sister has caught the attention of Death itself. A lot of this book is the woman and her real-world boyfriend being dysfunctional and even abusive to each other, as they struggle in the aftermath of the death of their loved ones. It’s a bit of a hard read. Obviously there are a lot of themes of grief and survivor’s guilt, and at the same time Death keeps leaving gifts for her - or interrupting her dreams - to the point where she thinks she’s going crazy. It’s an interesting story but the romance aspect is very minimal. There’s some smut, and a few romantic scenes between them, but Death is off-screen a lot of the time waiting for the protagonist to turn her own life around. It felt like an interesting take on the idea, but the romance felt a bit lacking, and by the time it starts getting to the point where they‘Re finally getting together it ends.
Omega’s Choosing - Evie Burks - 1⭐
I’ve been in fanfiction spaces for over twenty years now, and I’ve yet to see non-fanfic do ABO well. Due to a lack of omegas in this world each omega has to be partnered with two alphas, who mostly live on a special island they’re not allowed to leave unless they have a mate. Our protagonist goes to the island and gets mated, but there’s some friction between her alphas because they don’t want to share. Lots of sex later there are a couple of random threats that feel quite vague and lame on the page and are resolved very easily. There’s a potentially interesting angle in this where the two alphas start to have feelings for each other, but one rejects it quite firmly and uses a lot of homophobic language about it. It’s clearly internalised homophobia, but it’s still not great. It’s a mild spoiler (I don’t recommend this book anyway) but by the end the alpha has admitted he loves the other one, but still uses unpleasant language about homosexuality and refuses to allow himself to be referred to as anything other than heterosexual. It didn’t feel good to read.
