I saw my friend Kori do this on her bookstagram, so I thought I’d do the same thing here! If you want to see her post, you can find it here. Thanks for sharing that Kori ❤️. Here is a preview of some of the books that I’ll be talking about!

Award-winning author Aliette de Bodard returns with a powerful romantic fantasy that reads like The Goblin Emperor meets Howl’s Moving Castle in a pre-colonial Vietnamese-esque world.
Fire burns bright and has a long memory….
Quiet, thoughtful princess Thanh was sent away as a hostage to the powerful faraway country of Ephteria as a child. Now she’s returned to her mother’s imperial court, haunted not only by memories of her first romance, but by worrying magical echoes of a fire that devastated Ephteria’s royal palace.
Thanh’s new role as a diplomat places her once again in the path of her first love, the powerful and magnetic Eldris of Ephteria, who knows exactly what she wants: romance from Thanh and much more from Thanh’s home. Eldris won’t take no for an answer, on either front. But the fire that burned down one palace is tempting Thanh with the possibility of making her own dangerous decisions.
Can Thanh find the freedom to shape her country’s fate—and her own?

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.