I feel like any time I read a book from The Locked Tomb series, my head is always left reeling from all the ish that goes down before it ends.

Thank you Tor.com and NetGalley for the eARC for review!

Happy book birthday to this wonderful little novella!! I really enjoyed this one. I honestly feel like a broken record at this point, because I truly have enjoyed every single book I’ve read that they’ve published. That’s why I made a whole blog post about them haha. But ANYway, back to the book at hand.

Somehow I didn’t realize that this was a (very) loose retelling of The Little Mermaid!!!!! You know me and retellings. While reading, I picked up on the little nods to the fairytale and it made me love the book even more.

Reading this book was kind of like having a dream. Not in that it was super fantastical (though there are very cool sci-fi elements), but in the sense of like. If you had been thinking about love and what you would do for love all day, and then you go to sleep and have this dream. It’s like a dream in that it feels so much like deep feelings that everyone has but can’t quite vocalize. I don’t know if this makes any sense, but it was wonderful.

The world is so creative and blends so many ideas of different types of civilizations (space, land, sea) together. It is also very queernormative in a quiet way, and I love that so much.

I’m sorry for the short review I don’t want to say too much more, because I don’t want to ruin the experience for anyone. The bottom line is I definitely recommend this novella, and am eagerly awaiting more books from this author. Go get this one from your local indie bookstore (safely), an ebook retailer, your library, or wherever else you get books!

I have been meaning to read Aliette de Bodard’s work for a long time now, so I practically jumped when Tor.com approved me for this eARC!! I’d like to start this review with the AO3 content warnings and tags that the author wrote herself:

[tw-abuse, tw-assault-non-explicit] sword lesbian, diplomat lesbian, sunshine girl, fire girl (who is also sunshine girl), colonialism, sapphic shenanigans, symbolically unsubtle chess, garden flirting & more, drawn sword, tea on fire, scary tiger

If you didn’t know, AO3 is a fan-fiction website and their tagging system is godly. I need all books from now on to be described in this way, THANKS.

Thank you so so much to Tor.com for providing me with an eARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review!

I had this book on my “must buy immediately list” as soon as I heard about it because I loved the first novella in the series so much. I say series, but you can totally read these as standalone novellas. They both follow the same main character but absolutely no knowledge of the previous one is needed. If you’d like to read my review of the first novella, you can find it here. This one is just as incredible, and I think I loved it MORE if that’s even possible. WTTCDTM is a story within a story, and both tales are fierce and magical and beautiful. I’ll try to keep this review short, since it’s a novella and I don’t want to give too much away!

I don’t know if many of you keep track of who the publisher is for the books you read, but in general I don’t. There are so many! And the big publishing houses publish so many books it’s hard to keep track. There are a few exceptions for me, and today I’ll be recommending one in particular: Tor.com Publishing!