Thank you so much to Aliette and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC for review. This has not influenced my opinion, all thoughts are my own.

I meant to post this review back in November, closer to the book’s release date. But you know, life happens, and here we are in March and I’m just now posting it!! Ah well. When it comes to books, you can never be late to the party so it doesn’t matter that it’s months after the release. So anyway, yes, today I am (finally) talking about The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard, which released November 24th 2022.

The two of us are super excited to bring you a cover reveal today for one of our highly anticipated books! The book is The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard. The UK cover has already been revealed, so today we get to show you the US cover!

So, I admit defeat. I have miserably failed at #SciFiMonth. Sometimes I get in blogging and reading ruts, and turns out the most of November was a rut for me. My philosophy is to not force myself to read or blog during those times, since I don’t want either to feel like a chore. So I spent time playing video games, watching tv, and hanging out with my family. But I wanted to squeeze in one more post before the month ends! I saw that the SciFiMonth Twitter had posted about a post that Laura made about sci-fi novellas, so that sparked my motivation a bit and here I am doing the same! So thank you Laura for the inspo.

Although I missed the first day of Lunar New Year, I know that at least in Chinese tradition the new year celebration lasts for 15 days. So really, I’m only a little bit late to the festivities, as today (Feb. 26) is the last day (Lantern Festival). I originally wanted to make a post about books that take place during LNY, but ummmm I didn’t know of any haha. SO you get to have a good smattering of my favorite Asian authors (and a few authors I need to read)! Lunar New Year is celebrated in many different Asian cultures, so I wanted to include authors of many different Asian heritages.

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.