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.

I feel like it has been SOOOO long since I fell this in love with a YA fantasy book. But omg you GUYS!!! This book is so good!!! I had seen a bunch of my bookstagram friends reading and loving it, so I was expecting to like it as well. But I didn’t know JUST how great it would be.

Thank you very much to NetGalley and Erewhon Books for the eARC!

As you all know, I read a good amount of science fiction. However, the sci-fi that I read tends to be adult fiction, so I’m always on the hunt for good young adult sci-fi. I pretty much immediately requested this one on NetGalley when I saw it because revolutionaries? Hackers? Cybernetic enhancements? South Asian setting??? Yes. Yes and yes and yes. I really enjoyed all of these elements, but overall I think the plot was way too slow.

Thank you so so much to Tor.com for sending me an ARC for review!

I am pretty sure that every single Tor.com novella that I’ve read I’ve rated 4 or 5 stars. So when they reached out to me to see if I was interested in this book, my answer was “ummm duh.” Okay fine, I didn’t say exactly that but that’s what I was thinking! I was also excited because though I have read one of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s fantasy novels, I hadn’t read any of his science fiction. He seems to be much more well known for that, so I jumped at the chance.