The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 2-9-25

This was certainly an excellent reading week, with A+ books to kick off and close out the week. I adored The Silverblood Promise, and it’s the first thing that gave me real readalike feels for In the Shadow of Lightning. Now I’m stuck waiting for book two in BOTH series. That’s ARRGGGHHHH but it’s a good ARRGGGHHHH. Symbiote just plain gave me the chills, not just for the setting but for the whole entire story. I think I’m glad the author left the door open for a second book, because I want to read what happens next while at the same time I don’t want to know what happens next because I expect it to make the Alien movies look like the proverbial ‘Sunday School picnic’ in comparison.

I needed a cuddle after Symbiote – and you might too so consider that a warning – so this week’s (not just) cats picture is of ALL my boys cuddled close, with a blissful Tuna head-washing a rather sleepy George in the shelter of Galen’s slippered feet.

Current Giveaways:

$10 Gift Card or $10 Book PLUS EVENT-WIDE AMAZON/PAYPAL PRIZE in the January Wellness, Super Bowl & Valentine’s Day Giveaway Event!
$10 Gift Card or $10 Books in the Winter 2024-2025 Seasons of Books Giveaway Hop

Blog Recap:

A+ #AudioBookReview: The Silverblood Promise by James Logan
B #BookReview: The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen by Yuta Takahashi, translated by Cat Anderson
Grade A #BookReview: Dead in the Frame by Stephen Spotswood
B #BookReview: At the Fount of Creation by Tobi Ogundiran
A+ #BookReview: Symbiote by Michael Nayak
Stacking the Shelves (639)

Coming This Week:

The Serpent Under by Bonnie MacBird (#BookReview)
The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton (#BookReview)
Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow (#BookReview)
Do Me A Favor by Cathy Yardley (#AudioBookReview)
I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming (#BlogTour #BookReview)

Stacking the Shelves (639)

This week’s stack needs a new category! The two creepiest covers are Girl in the Creek and The Knight and the Butcherbird, although I’m also giving some side-eye in that department to Hemlock & Silver.

The prettiest covers, also the two books with the completely opposite titles, are Heir of Light and Written on the Dark, with the most adorable cover award going to Bodies and Battlements. Heir of Light is also one of the books I’m most looking forward to, along with Thaumaturgic Tapas. Although I’m technically not looking FORWARD to Thaumaturgic Tapas because I was looking forward so hard that I’ve already started it!

For Review:
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
Bodies and Battlements (Ravensea Castle #1) by Elizabeth Penney
Everything is Probably Fine by Julia London
The Game is Murder by Hazell Ward
Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner
Heir of Light (Lessons of the Academia #2) by Michelle Sagara
Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow
Love at First Sighting by Mallory Marlowe
Thaumaturgic Tapas (Hidden Dishes #3) by Tao Wong (eARC and audio)
The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam (Hart and Mercy #3) by Megan Bannen
Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay


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A+ #BookReview: Symbiote by Michael Nayak

A+ #BookReview: Symbiote by Michael NayakSymbiote by Michael Nayak
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: horror, science fiction, technothriller, thriller
Pages: 400
Published by Angry Robot on February 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

World War III rages, and the scientists at the South Pole are thankful for the isolation – until a group of Chinese scientists arrive at the American research base with a dead man in their truck. The potential for a geopolitical firestorm is great, and, with no clear jurisdiction, the Americans don’t know what to do. But they soon realize the Chinese scientists have brought far more with them than the body…
Within seventy-two hours, thirteen others lie dead in the snow, murdered in acts of madness and superhuman strength. An extremophile parasite from the truck, triggered by severe cold, is spreading by touch. With rescue impossible for months, it is learning from them. Evolving. It triggers violent tendencies in the winter crew, and, more insidiously… The beginnings of a strange symbiotic telepathy.
From an exciting new voice comes this propulsive SF-thriller, infused with authentic details about life in one of the world’s harshest, most mysterious landscapes, Antarctica.

My Review:

Four years from now – just think about that for a minute. Four years from right NOW. The world is on the brink of World War III.

And that’s not necessarily the most frightening part of the story!

The fears and frights and scares and outright terrors are layered in this OMG DEBUT novel, to the point where the reader’s heart is pounding alongside all the rest of the characters. I say ‘rest’ of the characters because frankly, if this is that close then we’re already in it and it’s already all of us.

A map of Antarctica showing the location of the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station (circled)

But those layers of fear may start with just thinking about how close this might be, but the part of the story that grabs the reader by the throat and doesn’t let go is the part that happens far, far away, in the remotest place on Earth.

Over an entirely too short 72 hours in the midst of the long Antarctic winter, the tiny overwinter crew at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is reduced from 41 scientists, technicians and support crew to just FIVE scarred and scared survivors after the station is invaded.

In the midst of the Third World War that is happening in the world at large, the crew at the U.S. controlled South Pole fears that the vehicle heading their way from the Chinese-controlled Dome A is the vanguard of that invasion.

And it is – but not in the way that anyone thinks. It’s not the three starving Chinese men who are the threat – it’s the dead man in the back, the one who dashed himself against the walls until he died.

He had a passenger. (Technically, the dead man had a host of passengers.) In the best SF horror thriller tradition, those passengers, a lab experiment gone much too successfully and entirely too wrong, have plans of their own.

Geographic South Pole

Escape Rating A+: There are so many ways to think/talk/write about Symbiote – and they ALL work. The whole thing was a WOW. (Admittedly, a WOW I had to stop reading at 1 am, even though I had less than an hour left. I could have finished. And I’d probably have been awake for the rest of the night as a result. It’s that kind of WOW.)

The horrors, as I said, are layered. There’s the World War III aspect, which is touched on just enough to give the reader the shivers, which then gets subsumed in all the other horrors, only to rear its ugly head again at the end.

Underneath the World War III scares and the political maneuverings that go with it is the horror so brilliantly pointed out in the first Jurassic Park movie, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” The results are not actually dissimilar, although part of the horror leans a bit on another famous, and much older quote from Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

One of the biggest, and most in the moment layers of the horrors in Symbiote is very definitely the human equation.

An aerial view of the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station taken in about 1983. The central dome is shown along with the arches, with various storage buildings, and other auxiliary buildings such as garages and hangars.

The small crew of overwinter “polies” is, as they are every year, alternately hard working and bored, often introverted but stuck in the enforced intimacy of a VERY TINY small town, isolated from the whole entire rest of the world and quite possibly just a bit – or a lot – cracked in one way or another.

There’s also a deep, resentful divide between the scientists – the ‘beakers’, and the techs and support crew – the ‘loggers’. On top of that there’s a huge gender imbalance, three men for every woman. It’s a pressure cooker on multiple axes and the stew gets aside to cook for a nine-month season. It’s not really a surprise that it boils over at the best of times – which this particular overwinter absolutely is not.

In other words, the story in Symbiote had more than enough stress factors to go to the ‘dark side’ from the human parts of the equation alone. And to some extent those human factors continue to drive events even after not all the humans are exactly still or just merely human.

And it’s those human factors that give the story its compulsive, breakneck pace. Because it’s the humans that we care about – and we do. We absolutely do. From the beginning, when it just seems like the scares come from humans just being human and some of them being shitty humans, we already have our hero, our sidekicks and most definitely our villains.

A photo of the station at night. The new station can be seen in the far left, the electric power plant is in the center, and the old vehicle mechanic’s garage in the lower right. The green light in the sky is part of the aurora australis.

As the snow gets deeper and the shit gets WAY more complicated, so do the motivations of ALL the players – and the reader gets even more invested as each character learns something new and shitty about themselves – and stands or folds under the weight of that knowledge.

I got so caught up in this story I barely stopped to sleep while I still could. When I finished, I found the ending cathartic enough – and yet still open. Because it reads like this chapter may be done, but there is plenty of story yet to come.

As there should be. Because the survivors have merely managed to survive the horror they faced in their isolated base. The huge, horrifying issues that brought this mess to their snowy doorstep are out in the wider world – and have yet to be addressed. Even though one of those messes already clearly has plans to address them.

#BookReview: At the Fount of Creation by Tobi Ogundiran

#BookReview: At the Fount of Creation by Tobi OgundiranAt the Fount of Creation (Guardians of the Gods, #2) by Tobi Ogundiran
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, historical fantasy
Series: Guardians of the Gods #2
Pages: 224
Published by Tordotcom on January 28, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The fate of the Orisha will be decided in the concluding volume of the Guardian of the Gods duology, inspired by Yoruba mythology.Perfect for fans of N. K. Jemisin, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Daughters of Nri, and Godkiller.For four hundred years, the world's remaining Orisha have fought to survive the rapaciousness of the soul-stealing Godkillers and the charismatic words of the singular, mysterious figure who leads them, known as the Teacher. Now they seek to kill the one person whose existence defies their very mandate.Now that Ashâke carries within herself the spirits of the surviving Orisha, she is on the hunt for allies who can help her defeat the encroaching army of Godkillers. But their influence is everywhere, and no one is immune―not even Ashâke. If she is to succeed, Ashâke will need to answer the question the Godkillers pose―are the Orisha even worth saving?

My Review:

I think I’m going to have to talk ‘around’ this story before I can get to talking ‘about’ this story because that’s the problem I had with reading the story and, as it turns out, with writing this review.

For a short book, it took me a rather long time to get into it, and it’s only now that I can see why that happened as well as what made it work in the end.

The first book in the Guardians of the Gods duology, In the Shadow of the Fall, drove me batty because it didn’t feel like a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. And even though it was clearly part one of a duology, that part still needed an ending – which it didn’t feel like it got.

I expected a cliffhanger, but instead the book read like it fell off a cliff – and took the reader right along with it.

It was a LOT of setup – necessary as background but frustrating in the character development. Then suddenly both Ashâke and the reader learn that everything she was taught was a lie and that all of her actions based on that lie were a deadly and dreadful mistake.

Now, in the duology’s conclusion, we learn the truths behind the lie that Ashâke was taught, the cost of her mistaken belief, not just to herself but to her entire world, and the revelation of the trick that lay behind it all.

In this particular story of discontented trickster gods and the manipulations they wield to get their way, it’s still a bit of a two-man grift – even if both are deceiving each other as much, or more, than they are the world at large.

Escape Rating B: For this reader, just as with the first book, it felt like the beginning of this half of the story was drifting rather than moving forward. After finishing, I realized that the story felt like it was drifting because the protagonist, Ashâke, was herself in a state of drift.

She’s not acting, she’s reacting, and she’s reacting to the drives and whims of the four active gods, for whom she is the combination of guardian, avatar, and only living channel. She was taught to see the gods, called Orisha in the West African myths in which this story is rooted, as all-powerful over the individual aspects that each individual Orisha represents.

And they ALL exploit that belief mercilessly because they have, in truth, lost control and are desperate to maintain some semblance of it.

Meanwhile, the social and political situation is out of control. The Orisha – and Ashâke – have been reduced to desperate straits because a charismatic ‘teacher’ has swayed the hearts and minds of the people who once worshiped the Orisha. Ashâke and the gods she guards are on the run and running out of room in which to keep running.

No one makes good decisions in such conditions – not even gods.

The final confrontation is huge and cathartic and is a truth that sets the people and even the Orisha free. Everyone, it seems, but Ashâke herself, who finally takes the position that was always meant to be hers. All she needed to do was rise to it in spite of all the things and people and even gods that stood in her way.

Grade A #BookReview: Dead in the Frame by Stephen Spotswood

Grade A #BookReview: Dead in the Frame by Stephen SpotswoodDead in the Frame: A Pentecost and Parker Mystery by Stephen Spotswood
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Pentecost and Parker #5
Pages: 384
Published by Doubleday on February 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The most dramatic installment yet in the Nero Award-winning Pentecost and Parker series, as Will scrambles to solve a shocking murder before Lillian takes the fall for the crime.

NEW YORK CITY, 1947: Wealthy financier and ghoulish connoisseur of crime, Jessup Quincannon, is dead, and famed detective Lillian Pentecost is under arrest for his murder. Means, motive, and a mountain of evidence leave everyone believing she's guilty. Everyone, that is, except Willowjean “Will” Parker, who knows for a fact her boss is innocent. She just doesn’t know if she can prove it.

With Lillian locked away in the House of D–New York City’s infamous women’s prison–Will is left to root out the real killer. Was it a member of Quincannon’s murder-obsessed Black Museum Club? Maybe it was his jilted lover? Or his beautiful, certainly-sociopathic bodyguard? And what about the mob hit-man who just happened to disappear after the shots were fired?

With the city barreling toward the trial of the century, each day brings fresh headlines and hints of long-buried scandals from Lillian’s past. Will is desperate to get her boss out from behind bars before her reputation is destroyed. Because the House of D is no kind place, especially for a woman with multiple sclerosis. Or one with so many enemies. Her health failing and targeted by someone who wants her dead, Lillian needs to survive long enough to take the stand.

With time running out on both sides of the prison walls, Will and Lillian must wager everything to uncover who put their thumb on the scales and a bullet in Quincannon’s head. Before Lady Justice brings her sword down, ending Pentecost and Parker's adventures once and for all.

My Review:

The Women’s House of Detention at 6th Avenue near West 9th Street in 1939.

This fifth entry in the Pentecost and Parker series begins with celebrated, hated, envied, feared, private investigator Lillian Pentecost on her way to the Women’s House of Detention at 6th Avenue near West 9th Street in New York City, under arrest for a murder that she surely did not commit.

Not that either the NYPD or the criminal justice system can see their way to that conclusion – at least not yet. The frame around Pentecost fits much too well, and there are too many people in the NYPD who have been itching to see this successful, intelligent woman fall. Of course the press is having a literal field day because everyone loves a scandal, and people especially love seeing the high and mighty cut down to size.

Pentecost’s right-hand woman, Willowjean Parker, comes back from her first-ever vacation to find her boss in handcuffs, their property being ransacked, and cops and reporters besieging the place. It seems as if the entire city wants a piece of Lillian Pentecost – only because they do.

This is the job that Will Parker has been training for, to become the lead investigator of Pentecost and Parker Investigations. That has been inevitable from the very first, marvelous book in this series, Fortune Favors the Dead, when Pentecost took Parker on as her assistant. Not because she wanted an assistant, but because Lillian Pentecost had been recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and she knew that her time as the lead investigator of her own agency was inevitably running out.

Now that it has, possibly temporarily but certainly abruptly, while Pentecost is behind bars and bail has been denied, it’s up to Will to ask herself what Lillian Pentecost would do – and do it. No matter how high the deck is stacked against them both. Pentecost is depending on her, and Willowjean Parker will not be found wanting. Whatever it takes.

Escape Rating A: The entire Pentecost and Parker series has been an edge-of-the-seat thrill ride from the very beginning in Fortune Favors the Dead, through Murder Under Her Skin, Secrets Typed in Blood, Murder Crossed her Mind and now this latest page-turner, Dead in the Frame.

What initially drew me into this series was its homage to a classic mystery series that isn’t talked about much anymore, and that’s the Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout. A series which I fully admit probably doesn’t wear well in the 21st century for all sorts of reasons.

But the concept of the Wolfe series was a partnership between an older detective who mostly refuses to leave his New York City brownstone and his younger assistant who does all the legwork and brings the case back to his boss. In the case of Pentecost and Parker, as the series began Pentecost was aware that she SHOULD be sticking to her brownstone, but can’t make herself do it as much as her doctor would prefer.

On the one hand, Pentecost and Parker are very much in the style of the noir fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, and Parker’s first-person chronicles of the cases resembles Wolfe’s junior partner Archie Goodwin in style and often substance. Howsomever, the lens through which Parker sees the world is VERY different from Goodwin’s. Parker is both female and queer, and grew up in as far over the wrong side of the tracks as possible as she literally ran away and joined the circus.

(If you’ve enjoyed Pentecost and Parker and you’re curious about their antecedents, the first book in the Nero Wolfe series is Fer-de-Lance. If you’re looking for a readalike for Pentecost and Parker, take a look at Lavender House by Lev A.C. Rosen.)

This particular entry in the series does a fantastic job of straddling the line between Parker’s now and ours, speaking both to the case itself and the reasons for it while at the same time using that vehicle to highlight issues that are very much a part of our present. Including, but very much not limited to, the way that Pentecost is tried in the press LONG before her actual trial because there are just so many powers-that-be that can’t bear to see a woman be independent, successful and show them up when they deserve it.

After taking a couple of days to think about this one, I think that what’s at the heart of this entry in the story is the issue of inevitability and the human response to knowing that an ending is coming. In a way, it’s all about, to paraphrase the poet Dylan Thomas, not going gently into that good night, and the form that the rage against the dying of the light takes. It’s about the conflict between revenge being a dish best served as cold as, and from, the grave versus “I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow-creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

All of that may seem a bit on the philosophical side, but it’s in there. And so is an absolutely cracking good mystery that sends both of our detectives through walks in the valley of the shadow of death and brings the inevitable changes that Pentecost has been staving off for years much closer much faster than her early hopes would have had it.

I have to say that the parts of this story where Pentecost is in the Women’s House of Detention are harrowing and also feel much too real – as the House of D most certainly was. Her treatment while incarcerated was entirely too typical of the treatment of prisoners in that nightmare of a place, and we go through that nightmare with her and feel her get both scared and scarred by it.

I was utterly caught up in the mystery, as I have been with every single one of their cases so far. I knew Pentecost was innocent but couldn’t see how she was going to get out from under – and for the longest time neither did she or Parker and it ratcheted the tension up to 11 the entire way.

The one thing that kept niggling at me is probably a result of my 21st century perspective having a disconnect with her post WW2 circumstances. I certainly understand why she hated the victim, and vice versa. But the information he was holding over Pentecost wasn’t about her, it was about her parents. I understand why no one would want that history dug up, but not why it was such a potentially huge scandal for Pentecost herself. Whatever the truth of that old matter, she herself can’t possibly be guilty of any of it as she was a child at the time. I expect to see that mess resolved, or at least as resolved as the dead past can be, in the next book in this series. Because that’s the story that Lillian Pentecost herself promised to work on next!

#BookReview: The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen by Yuta Takahashi, translated by Cat Anderson

#BookReview: The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen by Yuta Takahashi, translated by Cat AndersonThe Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen (Meals to Remember at the Chibineko Kitchen, #1) by Yuta Takahashi, Cat Anderson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: magical realism, sad fluff, world literature
Series: Meals to Remember at the Chibineko Kitchen #1
Pages: 192
Published by Penguin Books on February 4, 2025 (First published April 14, 2020)
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Your table awaits at the Chibineko Kitchen, where a soul-nourishing meal in the company of the resident kitten will transport you back in time to reunite with departed loved ones—for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold and The Midnight Library.
In a remote seaside town outside of Tokyo, Kotoko makes her way along a seashell path, lured by whispers of an enigmatic restaurant whose kagezen, or traditional meals offered in remembrance of loved ones, promise a reunion with the departed. When a gust of wind lifts off her hat, she sees running after it a young man who looks like her recently deceased brother. But it’s not her brother; it’s Kai, the restaurant’s young chef, who returns her hat and brings her to the tiny establishment, where he introduces her to Chibi, the resident kitten, and serves her steaming bowls of simmered fish, rice, and miso soup—the exact meal her brother used to cook for her. As she takes her first delicious bite, the gulls outside fall silent, the air grows hazy, and Kotoko begins a magical journey of last chances and new beginnings.

My Review:

As I’ve been saying for the past couple of weeks, I’m looking for comfort reads right now. The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen looked like it would take care of that particular desire, and it certainly did.

The cover looked oh-so-familiar, so I had to look back, and it IS familiar. It’s very similar to the cover of What You Are Looking For Is In the Library, and the story is similar as well – although there’s no cat in the library. That would have made that lovely story perfect – which it nearly was anyway.

The story about this curious kitten, Chibi, and the kitchen (and café) by the sea that provides her with a home – and fish! – is as lovely and charming as Chibi herself is. It’s also more than a bit reminiscent of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, so if you liked that you’ll love this, especially if you think that a good story is made just that bit better by the addition of a cat.

In this particular story, or rather set of stories loosely linked by Chibi and her kitchen, the stories are all wrapped around love and loss and especially closure. They’re all hurt/comfort stories, even though for the most part, both the hurt and the comfort are provided by a loved one who has already passed.

The Chibineko Kitchen specializes in ‘remembrance meals’, meals that are prepared to invoke the deepest memories of the person who is gone. They’re not supposed to be ‘fancy’ meals – although they might be. It all depends on what tastes and smells will best and most bring the memory of their lost loved one to life, one final time.

Because that’s the magic of the Chibineko Kitchen. For the length of time that the freshly prepared meal steams in the air, the dead return, just long enough for a short but meaningful conversation.

In the case of Kotoko and her desperate need to speak with her brother Yuiti one last time, it’s Kotoko’s need to deal with her survivor’s guilt that prompts her to come to the Chibineko Kitchen. Her brother shoved her out of the way of the oncoming vehicle that killed him instead of her. He was the bright star in their family and she doesn’t believe she was worthy of his sacrifice and doesn’t know how to live without him. It’s his words that help her move on and help her to help their grieving parents as well.

In return, in gratitude, in shared connection or perhaps all of the above, Kotoko returns to the Chibineko Kitchen to help Kai, the owner of the little cafe, find his own closure, even as he gives that gift to others.

A sad, sweet and lovely story of hurt, and comfort, and paying it forward. It’s the quintessential ‘sad fluff’ story, that’s a bit sad, a whole lot fluffy and leads to a cathartic if not always happy ending. This was just the comfort read I was looking for on a misty, moisty, cloudy day.

Escape Rating B: I picked this up because I knew exactly what I’d be getting into. Even though I wasn’t familiar with the concept of ‘remembrance meals’, the idea of the whole, that by some bit of ‘magic’ or imagination people who had experienced a loss could get some closure through the concept is very similar to Before the Coffee Gets Cold. So if you liked that you’ll like this.

The format is very much like that book as well, along with What You Are Looking For Is In the Library, mixed with a bit of my personal favorite book of this type, The Kamogawa Food Detectives. In fact, if the idea of these books sounds interesting but you’re not so sure about the magical realism bits, definitely take a look at The Kamogawa Food Detectives because that particular series doesn’t rely on magic, but on research. Which is magical in its own right, but not of the foolish wand waving or visits from the beyond type.

The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen is all of those in a very big book blender, with a few ‘miaows’ from The Full Moon Coffee Shop added for extra adorableness – and cat hair.

What made this one end with just the right note was the resolution at the end. Both the revelation that it’s never worked for Kai himself because the preparation of a remembrance meal isn’t something one can do for oneself. It must be done out of love and care, and the problem that each of the visitors to the Chibineko Kitchen is that they don’t have a lot of that for themselves when they visit – and that’s true for Kai as well.

That a story that is filled with hurt and comfort and closure managed to have a happy ending after all wrapped this comfortable and comforting read up with a lovely bow. Which means that I’m delighted that this is the first book in a series, and that the second book, The Calico Cat at the Chibineko Kitchen (because of course the kitten will have grown up), will be available in English this summer.

A+ #AudioBookReview: The Silverblood Promise by James Logan

A+ #AudioBookReview: The Silverblood Promise by James LoganThe Silverblood Promise (The Last Legacy, #1) by James Logan
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy mystery
Series: Last Legacy #1
Pages: 521
Length: 17 hours and 2 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on April 25, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Lukan Gardova is a cardsharp, academy dropout, and - thanks to a duel that ended badly - the disgraced heir to an ancient noble house. His life consists of cheap wine, rigged card games and wondering how he might win back the life he threw away.When Lukan discovers that his estranged father has been murdered in strange circumstances, he finds fresh purpose. Deprived of his chance to make amends for his mistakes, he vows to unravel the mystery behind his father's death.His search for answers leads him to Saphrona, fabled city of merchant princes, where anything can be bought if one has the coin. Lukan only seeks the truth, but instead he finds danger and secrets in every shadow.For in Saphrona, everything has a price - and the price of truth is the deadliest of all.

My Review:

To take a page from a story not nearly as different as I expected it to be, “So naturally, our story begins where all great stories begin; with the seediest bar in town,” not with a missing contact but with a man attempting to piss his life away one drink and one shady card game at a time.

Lukan Gardova believes that he’s merely in the process of completing a job he started years ago, when he killed a man in a duel, his family paid the price with what little was left of their fortune, and Lukan left home in a storm of regret and recriminations.

He thought he had nothing left to return to. He wasn’t quite right seven years ago when he left, but he is when the story opens, when his past catches up with him. When he learns that his father was murdered and that the old man’s last words, written in his own blood, were Lukan’s name, the name of a glittering city far, far from his home in Parva, and a third word that might be a place or might be a name but almost certainly represents both a mystery and one last chance to do right by his father. A task that Lukan always thought the old man believed him incapable of.

But needs must and Lukan needs a purpose even more than he needs air to breathe and wine to drink. Not that he hasn’t done entirely too much of the latter over the years he’s been on the run from his past. From himself.

There’s one talent that Lukan Gardova has, above all others, a knack for getting himself into ever deeper piles of shit and trouble – and getting himself out alive. He’ll need all of that, and more than a little help from friends he hasn’t even met yet, to find his father’s murderer.

His quest begins in the fabled city of Saphrona, searching for a person, place or thing named Zandrusa. Lukan thinks what he has is a clue, but what he really has is a key. The key to a long-bubbling pot of corruption and conspiracy, facilitated by figures out of myth and nightmare.

A key to his father’s past. And, perhaps, a key to his own future. If he can manage to survive the pile of shit and trouble that his dubious gift has placed in his path. The odds are against him. Exactly what he expected.

Escape Rating A+: Some stories are very much “out of the frying pan and into the fire”, some are frying pans and fires all the way down. Lukan Gardova, on the other hand, the moment he lands on yet another already hot griddle the flames lick around the edges and he throws himself right into their path. Again, and again, and AGAIN.

Reading this felt like watching TV from behind the couch, with my hands covering my eyes to keep from seeing the onrushing disaster while peeking through my fingers to see if the hero might manage, yet again, to escape that onrushing disaster.

I found myself caught between the book and the audio, over and over again, because, as much as I really, really, really, NEEDED to find out what happened next, I also really didn’t want to see Lukan crash and burn – yet I expected it at every turn, much as he himself does. (Also, the audio voiced by Brenock O’Connor is EXCELLENT.)

From the very beginning, The Silverblood Promise had me hooked on its mystery and its protagonist every bit as much as Lukan himself is hooked on finding his father’s murderer. This story also scratched the itch left from my epic book hangover after finishing In the Shadow of Lightning. (I’m still waiting for the second book in that series. It’s been nearly three years. Come on already! PLEASE!)

But as much as Lukan reminds me of Demir with the similar openings of the two stories, with both men rotting their brains as fast as they can in very low places, not quite suicidal but not quite looking out for themselves either, trying to outrun their own demons and secretly hoping the demons will catch up anyway, Lukan also reminds me more than a bit of Kihrin from The Ruin of Kings and Kinch from The Blacktongue Thief. The story, OTOH strikes me as a readalike for City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky with a touch of the upcoming Idolfire by Grace Curtis. These are all stories that I loved so it’s not a surprise that I fell hard for this one as well.

I’ve read that it reminds a LOT of readers of The Lies of Locke Lamora, but I haven’t read that – YET. Let’s just say that the repeated comparison has moved that story considerably up the virtually towering TBR pile.

Back to Lukan, who is, in spite of his cynicism and snark, really just a big softy under his fractured and fraying armor – both literal and figurative. He’s on his last nerve pretty much all the time, and it shows. He’s the fool that rushes in where angels and demons would both fear to follow, someone who leaps over and over again never assuming that the net will appear. He leaps assuming that it will be pulled out from under him if it bothers to shimmer into existence at all – however briefly.

It’s just a part of what makes the story so compelling as the reader is always on the edge of their seat waiting to see what mess Lukan is going to fall into even as he escapes the previous mess by the skin of his teeth.

He’s one of those characters whose heart is in the right place even as entirely too many opponents are attempting to reach it between his fourth and fifth ribs. He doesn’t merely feel the fear and do his damndest anyway, he feels the fear, fucks himself up over it, and still does his damndest anyway even though his road to good intentions is paved with trapdoors.

I had an absolute blast following Lukan and his friends and frenemies as they find their way into the rot at the heart of Saphrona and out the other side – more or less intact – on the run yet again. I’m on pins and needles waiting for the next book in The Last Legacy series, The Blackfire Blade, coming in November. I’m definitely NOT waiting most of a year to read, or more likely listen to it this time around. Because Lukan’s journey has clearly just begun, and I can’t wait to see what trouble it leads him into next!

The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 2-2-25

Today is Groundhog Day! When did that happen? Not literally, just that it seems like January passed by in the blink of an eye. Maybe half a blink. I’d say something about time flying when you’re having fun, but this month has been a bit more of “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana,” than it has been fun. Although some of the books have been good and thank goodness for that!

Although, speaking of time flying, I saw when I selected the winner for the Winter Wishes Giveaway Hop that a) I don’t have any more giveaways until early April because both the 1st and the 16th of the months of February and March occur on the weekend AND b) that my FOURTEENTH Annual Blogo-Birthday Celebration is coming up fast! April 4 is just two months away. Time really does also fly when you’re having fun, and I certainly have been having fun with Reading Reality for these past fourteen years!

Howsomever, this week’s cat picture makes it look like Luna isn’t having all that much fun. This is definitely Luna’s serious face. Do you think she knows that she hasn’t been featured since last year? It sure looks like she does and that she is NOT AMUSED by the fact. Not at all.

Current Giveaways:

$10 Gift Card or $10 Book PLUS EVENT-WIDE AMAZON/PAYPAL PRIZE in the January Wellness, Super Bowl & Valentine’s Day Giveaway Event!
$10 Gift Card or $10 Books in the Winter 2024-2025 Seasons of Books Giveaway Hop

Winner Announcements:

The winner of the Winter Wishes Giveaway Hop is Viki S.

Blog Recap:

B #BookReview: A Bird in the Hand by Ann Cleeves
B #AudioBookReview: The Conjurer’s Wife by Sarah Penner
C #BookReview: Beast of the North Woods by Annelise Ryan
A- #BookReview: The Orb of Cairado by Katherine Addison
Grade A #BookReview: Bonded in Death by J.D. Robb
Stacking the Shelves (638)

Coming This Week:

Dead in the Frame by Stephen Spotswood (#BookReview)
The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen by Yuta Takahashi, translated by Cat Anderson (#BookReview)
The Silverblood Promise by James Logan (#AudioBookReview)
Symbiote by Michael Nayak (#BookReview)
At the Fount of Creation by Tobi Ogundiran (#BookReview)

Stacking the Shelves (638)

Well, the blue/purples certainly reign supreme in this batch of covers, don’t they? And they are all so very pretty, too! Personally, I think that The God and the Gwisin, The Lady Sparks a Flame and The Love Remedy are vying for prettiest cover, but an argument could be made for nearly every book in the stack. Except maybe Marble Hall Murders and Space Brooms! Neither of those is exactly pretty, but I’m really, really curious about Space Brooms!, along with The Gravedigger’s Almanac.

The two I’m most looking forward to, like really a LOT, are Knave of Diamonds and Marble Hall Murders. I’ve loved the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series from its beginning with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, and I always get caught up in the twists and turns of Horowitz’ Moonflower Murders series even though I’m not generally fond of any of the characters. We’ll certainly see how this one turns out in the months ahead!

For Review:
The God and the Gwisin (Fate’s Thread #2) by Sophie Kim
The Gravedigger’s Almanac (Leopold von Herzfeldt Case Book #1) by Oliver Pötzsch, translated by Lisa Reinhardt
Knave of Diamonds (Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes #19) by Laurie R. King
The Lady Sparks a Flame (Damsels of Discovery #2) by Elizabeth Everett
The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World by J.R. Dawson
Marble Hall Murders (Susan Ryeland #3) by Anthony Horowitz
The Miniaturist’s Assistant by Katherine Scott Crawford
Never the Roses by Jennifer K. Lambert
Space Brooms! by A.G. Rodriguez
Whisper in the Wind (Fetch Phillips #4) by Luke Arnold

Borrowed from the Library:
The Love Remedy (Damsels of Discovery #1) by Elizabeth Everett


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