A- #AudioBookReview: Down in the Sea of Angels by Khan Wong

Posted on April 24, 2025April 23, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

Down in the Sea of Angels by Khan Wong
Narrator: Eunice Wong
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, post apocalyptic, time travel, hopepunk
Pages: 336
Length: 11 hours and 11 minutes
Published by Angry Robot, Dreamscape Lore on April 22, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

An intense and thoughtful time-travelling dystopian fantasy where three individuals, psychically linked through time, fight enslavement, exploitation, and environmental collapse. A great read for fans of Emily St. John Mandel.

In 2106, Maida Sun possesses the ability to see the entire history of any object she touches. When she starts a job with a cultural recovery project in San Francisco with other psions like her, she discovers a teacup that connects her with Li Nuan, a sex-traffificked girl in a 1906 Chinatown brothel, and with Nathan, a tech-designer and hedonist of 2006.

A chance encounter with a prominent political leader reveals to Maida his plan to contain everyone with psionic abilities, eliminate their personal autonomy, and use their skills for his own gain. Maida is left with no choice but to join a fight she doesn’t feel prepared for, with flashes of the past, glimpses of the future and a band of fellow psions as her only tools. She must find a way to stop this agenda before it takes hold and destroys life as she knows it. Can the past give Maida the key to saving her future?

My Review:

This is a hard book to characterize, and even more difficult to sum up in just a few – or even a few dozen – pithy phrases. But I’m certainly going to try.

A big part of that difficulty is that it isn’t just one story. It’s three stories that are loosely linked – even though that’s not obvious at the beginning – centered around three individuals who do not know what they have to do with each other any more than the reader does.

They’re also not experiencing the same thing – or even the same sort of thing, although the first and third are closer in that particular than either of them would ever imagine.

But there is one thing that they share from the beginning. All of their stories, all of their histories and hopes and dreams, take place in San Francisco, a place that has carried the hopes and dreams of so very many since long before the city boomed during the California Gold Rush.

In 1906, Li Nuan, 16 years old, sold by her parents into slavery, forced into sex work, whose very existence is proof that slavery was not eradicated by the Civil War, is ‘in service’ to one of the Tong bosses who ‘owned’ pre-Earthquake Chinatown. And the earthquake is coming, the end of the world as Li Nuan knows it. But she’s seeing visions of the quake, the fire that follows, and the death and destruction that results. And those visions have told her that she can seize the freedom she yearns for in the chaos – if she’s willing to do whatever it takes to claim it.

Nathan Zhao in 2006, an up-and-coming tech designer, is busy living his very good life without taking too much care for the consequences to the world he lives on. He’s a good man, a good person, he’s got a great job, is in a happy long-term relationship with his boyfriend, they’re free to be openly gay – which he knows is a privilege – and life is, well, good. The vision that he gets, both of Li Nuan’s past and of the environmental destruction to come in his near future, opens his eyes and sets his life on a different course than he’d originally planned.

The reason that both Li Nuan and Nathan are having these life-changing visions is Maida Sun. Maida is a historian and more importantly, is gifted with psychometry in a future where a significant minority of the population has been gifted with psionic powers of one stripe or another. Maida can see the past of any object she touches, and she’s working on a cultural reclamation project in the ruins of what her post-apocalyptic society calls ‘The Precursor Era’. In other words, us.

And that’s where all the links get filled in – and pushed out into the future. Nathan and his friends buried a time capsule in 2006, a capsule that is uncovered as part of the project Maida is working on. In that capsule, along with photos, memorabilia, a few personal items and a bit of outright junk, is a jade tea cup from the mid-19th century. A cup that passed through Li Nuan’s hands, down the generations to her great-grandson Nathan, and into that box only to emerge a century later under the hands – and into the powers – of Nathan’s great-great-niece, Maida.

At a point where Maida’s post-apocalyptic world is on the cusp of descending into the dystopia they initially avoided. But only will continue to do so at this terrible, hopeful juncture if Maida can seize her day and her freedom as decisively as her ancestor Li Nuan did hers.

Escape Rating A-: This is one of those stories that made me think pretty much all the thoughts and feel like it brought up all the readalikes. Which is only fair as it’s not one story but three stories and they aren’t as similar as one might expect in a single book.

At the same time, it did feel as if all the stories revolved around the idea of ‘carpe diem’, even though the days that each person in the change needed to seize were very different. Still, when they each grabbed hold of that day out of hope for the future, they each moved the story forward into the hope that they reached out for.

A virtuous circle rather than the vicious cycle that begins each of their stories.

Li Nuan’s story is the most harrowing – not surprising considering the conditions under which she was brought to California. Nathan is honestly having a lot of fun in his part of the story – at least until he sees that his world is not only due for a great big fall – but a fall that he’s likely to live to see and and can’t continue his own personal revel toward the cliff even if he can’t do much to fix the wider world.

But the story is centered in Maida Sun’s early 21st century post-apocalypse. Initially her world seems filled with hope of a brighter day for everyone – even if most people are still cursing the ‘Precursors’ (meaning US) for leaving such a big damn mess to clean up.

Still, the human side of Maida’s world is filled with hope. The ‘Collapse’ of the Precursor civilization in the 2050s, the climatic changes, the wars and death and destruction that followed, set humanity up for a more cooperative future – with the help of the great ‘Bloom’ of auroras that surrounded the planet and gave rise to psionic powers among a percentage of the population.

But by Maida’s 2106, the new normal has been normal long enough, and the devastation of the collapse is just far enough back in time and memory, that some people are starting to think that the ‘good old days’ were better than they were – at least for THEIR sort of people. Whatever that might mean. And, because humans are STILL gonna be human, there’s always someone just watching and waiting to take advantage of that impulse. By creating a new scapegoat, giving a new generation someone to hate and fear, and telling as many big lies as they can to weaponize society so that a new authoritarian regime can rise and start the whole terrible cycle all over again.

It’s hard to miss the historical parallels, because the playbook being used is old and familiar and all the more frightening for being followed right this very minute. What gives Down in the Sea of Angels its hopeful ending is that Maida Sun and the psions are finally living in a time when more people seem to want the world to get better for everyone – or alternatively that she and the psion community have the truth on their side and the opportunity to nip the forces of regression, repression and evil in the bud before the tide has turned completely in their favor.

More than a few of all of those thoughts I mentioned at the top before I close. One of the reasons this story worked as well as it did is that San Francisco is a bit of a liminal place and its history as well as its reputation for being a bit ‘out there’ for multiple definitions of that phrase fit the story. (For an entirely different fantasy featuring San Francisco’s liminality take a look at Passing Strange by Ellen Klages.)

Maida’s particular early 22nd century was fascinating because it didn’t follow the usual patterns for post-apocalyptic stories – or at least there was clearly a delay between the apocalypse and the dystopia – or we missed the first wave of dystopia and this is the attempt of a second dystopia to take hold. It’s a very different post-apocalyptic vision from either The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed or The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow and the contrasts are quite interesting.

As much as the rising tide of authoritarianism in Maida’s time resembles both the rise of Nazi Germany AND the present political situation in the United States, the way that the anti-psion sentiment is created and promoted by the powers-that-be owes more than a bit, in the fictional sense at least, to the anti-mutant sentiment in the X-Men movie series.

I’ll confess that I picked this up because I absolutely adored the author’s debut novel, The Circus Infinite – and I was hoping to get a similar feeling from this book. In the end I did enjoy Down in the Sea of Angels very much, but not quite as much as Circus, and I think that’s because of the split story lines and how long it took them to figure out that they were part of each other. Howsomever, I did absolutely love the audio narration by Eunice Wong, and it was lovely to hear her voice again, telling me a marvelous story.

A- #AudioBookReview: Trap Line by Timothy Zahn

Posted on April 10, 2025April 9, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

Trap Line by Timothy Zahn
Narrator: Greg D. Barnett
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera
Pages: 49
Length: 1 hour and 21 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on March 25, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

An engineer’s groundbreaking solo mission is rudely interrupted when he stumbles into an interstellar trap. The New York Times bestselling author of the Thrawn trilogy is back with a wholly original short story of first contact.
En route to far-off stars, Toby’s consciousness has a crucial mission: inhabit his clone long enough to repair a spaceship, then zip back to Earth. He’s done it a million times, more or less. OK, twelve times. It should only take a few hours.
Until he wakes up in jail. And he’s not alone.
His fellow prisoners: a cadre of alien soldiers. His prison: an ethereal boundary that will imprison their spirits until their bodies die. His jailers can’t even see him. But their pet cat (er, iguana cat?) can—and it’s got a serious case of the zoomies.
With humanity’s place in the odd and ever-widening universe riding on Toby’s choices, it’s time to saddle up for a ghostly game of cat and mouse.

My Review:

What Toby Collier comes to appreciate when his ‘astral’ manifests in an alien trap instead of aboard the Terran FarJump ship Janus out in the far flung galaxy is something attributed to poet William Butler Yeats centuries before Toby was born, that “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.”

Certainly neither Toby, nor anyone from Earth, has ever met anyone similar to the vaguely avian-like Hyfisk, the soldiers with whom Toby is trapped in a small, family-operated space ship in the middle of the great, wide galaxy that all of them were traversing.

The family, Porpou, his wife, their daughter Ibbi and her ‘iguana cat’ Bisqitty, make their living by trapping astrals like Toby and the Hyfisks and reporting them to the ‘Overmasters’, whoever or whatever THEY are. For the family, it’s a living – if not necessarily a luxurious or even steady one.

But the trap is a roadblock for the astrals, an interruption that will lead to Toby’s death when he doesn’t complete his job out on the far reaches of human-discovered space and return in a reasonable time frame. Because his bosses will cut their losses along with the life-support of his physical body.

The Hyfisks’ situation is more dire – they are soldiers on the way to defend an important colony from an aggressive enemy. Not that they also won’t die when their life support is cut, but their duty is more important to them than their individual lives.

Except that they have been stuck in that trap long enough to give up. Toby, freshly trapped, hasn’t. And is determined not to. He’s also an engineer rather than a soldier, and he hasn’t yet met a puzzle that he’s not going to at least attempt to solve.

The Hyfisk can’t solve the problem with the knowledge they have. Toby, on the other hand, brings fresh – if non-corporeal – eyes and mind to the same problem and figures out that if they share their knowledge, they can escape. If they trust each other enough.

And if they can get the iguana cat to cooperate – which might be the most difficult part of the whole thing. Her name isn’t pronounced ‘BisKITTY’ for nothing.

Escape Rating A-: Trap Line turned out to be a whole lot of fun and I’m very glad I listened to/read it. Even though I initially picked it up because I was having a difficult time getting into anything. Monday’s book seriously did a number on my concentration, but this little story turned out to be the cure.

I picked this up through Kindle Unlimited – a subscription I get happier about all the time. It was fun, it was quick, the audio narrator did a great job portraying Toby AND the Hyfisks and it all just made for the reading pick-me-up I was desperate for.

For an SF story, Trap Line was surprisingly cozy. It’s a small cast in an even smaller setting, just ten Hyfisks, three insectoid aliens, an iguana cat, and Toby. It’s also small in length, but it sets itself well AND gives the reader just enough to get why and how Toby and Irion, the commander of the Hyfisks, manage to come to (mostly) trust each other in this “enemy of my enemy is my friend’ scenario. Particularly as Toby and the humans aren’t aware of the Overmasters enough to BE their enemy – at least not yet – AND Toby manages to convince Irion that the trap-keeping family are not really an enemy to either of them. They’re all just trying to get by – like everyone else.

That this is also a story about the cleverness of humans and the inventiveness of our species instead of any attempt to win by domination or violence – and not just because it wouldn’t work in this situation AT ALL – made this a whole lot of fun, with a comforting layer of competence over the whole thing.

It broke my reading slump – and I’m incredibly grateful for that!

Even though Toby, the Hyfisks, and Porpou have no ability to communicate all together (Toby and the Hyfisks can communicate because they’re all astrals), they still manage to concoct a mutually beneficial plan that has the wonderful added benefit of sticking it to the Overmasters for all of them without the Overmasters being aware that they’ve been shafted. Toby, the Hyfisks and Porpou have made friends, even if they haven’t managed to share a single word in ANY language – and their quiet rebellion makes for a glorious – and friendly – ending to this delightful short story.

#AudioBookReview: The Sirens by Emilia Hart

Posted on April 7, 2025April 6, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> C Reviews

The Sirens by Emilia Hart
Narrator: Barrie Kreinik
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Australian history, fantasy, historical fantasy, historical fiction, magical realism
Pages: 352
Length: 10 hours and 56 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, St. Martin's Press on February 13, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A story of sisters separated by hundreds of years but bound together in more ways than they can imagine
2019: Lucy awakens in her ex-lover’s room in the middle of the night with her hands around his throat. Horrified, she flees to her sister’s house on the coast of New South Wales hoping Jess can help explain the vivid dreams that preceded the attack—but her sister is missing. As Lucy waits for her return, she starts to unearth strange rumours about Jess’s town—tales of numerous missing men, spread over decades. A baby abandoned in a sea-swept cave. Whispers of women’s voices on the waves. All the while, her dreams start to feel closer than ever.
1800: Mary and Eliza are torn from their loving home in Ireland and forced onto a convict ship heading for Australia. As the boat takes them farther and farther away from all they know, they begin to notice unexplainable changes in their bodies.
A breathtaking tale of female resilience, The Sirens is an extraordinary novel that captures the sheer power of sisterhood and the indefinable magic of the sea.

My Review:

The Sirens turned out to be a book that I just plain need to get out of my system so I can make like Elsa and “let it go”. And that’s not a good thing.

Normally I do a plot summary/commentary first, but I don’t think I can here because saying anything more than is in the blurb would be a spoiler as nothing is revealed at the start. The whole story is about secrets and their very slow reveal in a family that has so much dysfunction – and such a unique dysfunction at that – that it lasts centuries. If not longer.

It takes place in two distinct timelines two centuries apart, the early 1800s and the early 2000s. The stories are wrapped around a pair of sisters in each timeline, seemingly joined by a rare and common disease. Or a birth defect. Or a genetic anomaly. Or perhaps, all of the above.

They’re not exactly allergic to water, but they all have aquagenic urticaria, which is a real thing that Mary and her sister Eliza certainly wouldn’t have had a name for in the early 1800s, although Jess and her sister Lucy in the early 21st century certainly do. Not that it helps, particularly as their expression of the condition seems unique to the four of them. They don’t get hives, they get scales – and sprout gills.

The story both is, and isn’t, about their shared condition. Rather, it’s about the secrets that are kept from them because of it, and the events that occur as a result of their need or desire to hide it and the traumas that are a consequence of all of the above.

That Jess and Lucy are both dreaming of Mary and Eliza throughout the story, and experience their fate with them within those dreams, links the past and the present in ways that Jess and Lucy don’t expect – but the reader certainly does long before the story comes to its conclusion.

Escape Rating C: I came so very close to DNF’ing this one really early on. The only reason I kept going is that I received an ALC (Advance Listening Copy) through Netgalley and that’s one queue I try to keep relatively clean. I tried reading the thing instead because that would be faster but couldn’t manage that either, so I stayed with the audio and increased the speed – which I seldom do because I’m normally there for the voices.

The narrator in this particular case, Barrie Kreinik, was very good and I’d certainly be willing to listen to another book she narrated. She even sang, and sang well, the parts that needed singing, but the book as a whole drove me so far round the bend that I just needed to get it done.

I honestly expected to like this. And I did like the historical parts – both because the history is fascinating and because, in spite of Mary’s story being ‘told’ through Jess’ and Lucy’s dreams, Mary and Eliza’s story was still mostly ‘shown’ rather than ‘told’. We see the action – and its results, as they happen, and it’s raw and harrowing and immediate even though it takes place two centuries ago. Mary may be filled with angst and fear and regret – and she often is and rightfully so considering what happens to her – but in the moment she acts and doesn’t angst before and regurgitate after.

Which is far from the case when it comes to Lucy’s story. Lucy’s story is not merely told instead of shown nearly all the time, but it’s told in the most distancing way possible. First she angsts over what’s about to happen. Then she angsts over it while it’s happening and we see the event through her emotions about the event rather than the event itself. Afterwards she chews over the event that has already passed and angsts about it even more.

The thing is that the story is told from inside Lucy’s head, but we’re not actually in Lucy’s head. Instead the story is told from a third-person perspective that puts Lucy’s thoughts and emotions at a distance. That so much of Lucy’s story is told either through Lucy listening to podcasts or Lucy reading newspaper articles and Jess’ diary puts even more distance in that distance.

So we’re not close enough to Lucy to FEEL with her, and her pattern of telling most of the parts of the story three times made it difficult for me to feel FOR her as I just wanted her to get on with it. That I figured things out LONG before she did left me waiting for someone or something to hit her with a clue-by-four because she really, really needed one.

Putting it another way, Lucy’s story is distant because it’s filtered and chewed over and gnawed at and angsted about. We get so much of Lucy processing her story, like a cow chewing its cud, that we don’t experience it. And it feels as if neither does she.

In the end, I got left with a whole heaping helping of mixed feelings. The story turned out to be a whole lot of atmosphere, often creepy, a great deal of deserved angst and not a lot of action until very near the end when all the various plot threads come to an ending that should have been a surprise but mostly wasn’t. The historical story about the horrors of the convict transport ships that carried prisoners from Britain to Australia was searing and horrifying every nautical mile. It was a dark journey and a dark time in a dark age.

The concept of Jess’ and Lucy’s part of the story had the potential to tell a story of female resilience and the power of sisterhood, but that part of the story got lost in the slow and repetitious way that it was told. There was so much potential in this story, but too much of it got washed away by the tides.

Of course, your reading mileage – even measured in nautical miles, kilometers or fathoms – may vary.

Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Railway Conspiracy by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan

Posted on March 26, 2025March 25, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

The Railway Conspiracy (Dee & Lao, #2) by John Shen Yen Nee, S.J. Rozan
Narrator: Daniel York Loh
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Dee & Lao #2
Pages: 304
Length: 8 hours and 25 minutes
Published by Recorded Books, Soho Crime on April 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Judge Dee and Lao She must use all their powers of deduction—and kung fu skills—to take down a sinister conspiracy between Imperial Russia, Japan, and China in a rollicking new mystery set in 1920s London.
The follow-up to The Murder of Mr. Ma, this historical adventure-mystery is perfect for fans of Laurie R. King and the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films.
London, 1924. Following several months abroad, Judge Dee Ren Jie has returned to the city to foil a transaction between a Russian diplomat and a Japanese mercenary. Aided by Lao She—the Watson to his Holmes—along with several other colorful characters, Dee stops the illicit sale of an extremely valuable “dragon-taming” mace.
The mace’s owner is a Chinese businesswoman who thanks Dee for its retrieval by throwing a lavish dinner party. In attendance is British banking official A. G. Stephen, who argues with the group about the tenuous state of Chinese nationalism—and is poisoned two days later. Dee knows this cannot be a coincidence, and suspects Stephen won’t be the only victim. Sure enough, a young Chinese communist of Lao’s acquaintance is killed not long after—and a note with a strange symbol is found by his body.
What could connect these murders? Could it be related to rumors of a conspiracy regarding the Chinese Eastern Railway? It is once again all on the unlikely crime-solving duo of Dee and Lao to solve the case before anyone else ends up tied to the rails.

My Review:

I was completely enthralled by the first book in the Dee & Lao series, The Murder of Mr. Ma, and have been hoping for a second since the minute I turned the very last page of that first. So I was more than pleased to see this second book appear – even if finishing it has returned me to my earlier state, now hoping for a third book to be published.

Because this second adventure was every bit as marvelous as the first – and in some ways better as we already know these characters but now have the opportunity to plumb their hidden – and sometimes not so hidden – depths.

This second of Dee and Lao’s adventures is set in 1924 London. Both characters are based on real historical figures. Lao’s background and current profession were historically as the series portrays him. From 1924 until 1929, he was a lecturer at the University of London on the subjects of Chinese language and literature. Whether his students were as frustrating, and whether Lao himself was as utterly bored out of his mind as he is portrayed in the story, is not certain, but they certainly leave the fictional Lao ripe to be carried along in Dee’s adventures.

Spring Heeled Jack as depicted in the English penny dreadful Spring-Heeled Jack #2, Aldine Publishing, 1904.

Dee Ren Jie is as much myth as he is historical, but the historical Dee was a magistrate in late 7th century China. How much the historical Dee resembles this fictional interpretation is unknown, but I think it’s safe to say that the original Dee never masqueraded as the English folk hero/demon Spring-heeled Jack – as Lao’s friend Dee often does.

The story combines these bits of history with a compelling, confounding mystery, as all the best historical mysteries do.

Dee has returned to London after a year’s absence as an agent of the then-current Nationalist government in China. But that government is shaky at best. There are movements within China, including but not limited to the Communist Party, to bring the Nationalist government down. And there are forces outside China, great and would-be great powers far from limited to Britain, Russia, Japan and the United States, observing and even influencing events hoping that to destabilize the Nationalist regime so that they can pick up the pieces.

Which is where Dee and Lao and their associates, the redoubtable Sergeant Hoong and young English pickpocket Jimmy Fingers come into this tale, which begins with the return of a precious stolen artifact, middles in a great deal of romantic misdirection practiced successfully upon the supposedly impervious Dee, and concludes with an explosive confrontation on the London Necropolis Railway. (The Necropolis Railway is another bit of history that seems like it must be fiction, but it did really exist!)

When the dust settles, and there’s LOTS of it to settle, the immediate crisis – at least the London branch of it – is over. Dee is left realizing that he’s been a fool. And that while this crisis has been ameliorated it has absolutely not been averted – but that the fight will take him to other shores in other guises. In addition to making a fool out of him, the conspiracy has also made him their scapegoat, and London has become much too hot for him – at least as long as he continues to present himself as, well, himself.

So poor Lao is stuck returning to the boredom of his academic existence, while the country he left behind and plans to return to, is in jeopardy from all sides – including the one that he himself espouses.

It all sounds ripe for another book, doesn’t it? I certainly hope so!

Escape Rating A: I loved this even more than I did the first book, The Murder of Mr. Ma, which means that I need to give another shoutout to First Clue Reviews for their featured review of that first book.

One of the reasons I liked this better leads around and back to the other reason I got into this series. Many of the reviews of Dee & Lao liken them to Sherlock Holmes, especially the more active Guy Ritchie movie interpretations. While I think that is debatable, one way in which Dee & Lao are certainly like Holmes and Watson (and also Barker & Llewelyn) is that Lao serves as Dee’s chronicler as Watson does Holmes, with the same amount of reluctance to participate in the process on the parts of both Dee and Holmes.

Which means that this story is told in Lao’s first person voice. This is his interpretation – with the occasional use of a bit of literary license – of the events. In that regard, the narrator Daniel York Loh does a terrific job of interpreting Lao’s voice, to the point that when I ended up reading the last part of the book because I needed to find out who the true leader of the conspiracy is and how all the issues and conundrums got resolved – I was still hearing Loh’s voice in my head speaking as Lao.

I couldn’t put this one down because of how effectively it combined the pure whodunnit of the theft and murder conspiracy in London with the depth of historical setting and situation that lay behind it and the increasing knowledge of and bond between the characters, this most unlikely band of ‘scoobies’ that includes a government official, a merchant, a scholar, a pickpocket and has increased by the addition of a knife thrower and a dog. Dee pretends they are a circus act and he’s not far wrong in some aspects, but if it is it’s a circus that manifests a well of competence and an ability to improvise on the spot and roll with the punches.

And not just the punches they are administering themselves.

This reader, at least, is already anticipating Dee and Lao’s next adventure. It’s sure to be another fantastic read. After all, thanks to the conspiracy it’s going to have to start with Dee coming back from the dead!

Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow

Posted on March 17, 2025March 16, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow
Narrator: Aida Reluzco
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, dystopian, fantasy, horror, short stories
Pages: 36
Length: 1 hour and 17 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on March 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

New York Times bestselling author Alix E. Harrow weaves a dystopian fairy tale that follows the town storyteller as she struggles to protect a local demon from the knight hired to kill it.
In this gritty, haunting tale about doing whatever it takes for love, a small-town storyteller resolves to keep the local monster—and her own secrets—safe from a legendary knight.
Nestled deep in the steep hills, valleys, and surrounding woodlands lies Iron Hollow, a rural community beset by demons. Such horrors are common in the outlands, where most folks die young, if they don’t turn into monsters first. But what’s causing these transformations?
No one has the answer, not even the town’s oral historian, seventeen-year-old Shrike. And when a legendary knight is summoned to hunt down the latest beast to haunt their woods, Shrike has more reason than most to be concerned. Because that demon was her wife. And while Shrike is certain that May still recognizes her—that May is still human, somewhere beneath it all—she can’t prove it.
Determined to keep May safe, Shrike stalks the knight and his demon-hunting hawk through the recesses of the forest. But as they creep through toxic creeks and overgrown kudzu, Shrike realizes the knight has a secret of his own. And he’ll do anything to protect it.

My Review:

I picked this up for two reasons. The first reason – and the more important – is that I really loved The Starling House by this same author, also in audio. The second reason is that I’ve been experimenting with a Kindle Unlimited subscription and have really liked some of the Amazon Original Stories with audio that I’ve discovered, notably my holiday romp through the Under the Mistletoe Collection.

The Knight and the Butcherbird looked like exactly the kind of story I’ve been enjoying more lately, dark fantasy hovering over the edge of horror, in a nice, bite-sized audio version by an author I already like. It sounded like a win/win – and it absolutely was. All the more so because this is one of those stories that straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy in a way that chills, thrills, and makes the reader, or at least this reader, go both “Aha!” AND “Ahhhh” at the end.

It also turned out to remind me of a whole lot of different, differently weird and differently creepy stories while blending into a darkly satisfying whole.

This is very much a dystopia, the kind of dystopia you get when your story is set on an Earth that we’ve fucked around on and left the consequences for our descendants. At first, I thought it was a bit Mad Max but things aren’t quite that bad – or at least the violence isn’t quite that widespread.

Instead, it’s very much like the world of Premee Mohamed’s The Annual Migration of Clouds duology, where pollution has ruined the ground, the air, the wildlife and the weather, but people are hanging on by the literal edge of their fingernails, like the grim death that’s inevitably coming for them sooner than it should.

But that’s the view in the ‘outlands’, which is very much where Iron Hollow survives in remote, rural Appalachia. Just as in Clouds, there are “Enclaves”, protected places where technology is still functional, where the elite live in abundance, health and prosperity and look down upon the dying primitives that send them raw materials to keep their technology functional so they can remain all of the above.

Those outlands, still rife with pollution and radiation and microplastics, produce more than just raw materials. They are also plagued by monsters. Monsters that the Enclave-folk call demons. Monsters that used to be their friends and their loved ones, transformed by an alchemy that no one understands and no one can cure.

The Enclaves send out knights to eliminate those monsters. Not out of altruism. Not out of the goodness of their hearts. Out of need and greed. The populations of the Enclaves have grown too large for their technology to maintain. The outlanders are dying off, each generation smaller than the next. Extinction is in sight. All the Enclaves need to do is wait to sweep into what will soon be empty lands.

But those lands are filled with monsters, and until the science of the Enclaves can find a way to stop humans from becoming monsters, the land they covet is not safe for them to take.

The knight that comes to Iron Hollow has come to kill the latest monster. The monster that, as far as Shrike, Iron Hollow’s scribe and archivist is concerned, is still her wife May. Whether May is a monster or not. Because, when all is said and done, aren’t all of us capable of becoming monsters if the need is great enough?

Escape Rating A: This was a story that chilled me to the bone – even though I laughed myself silly when the knight of this story, Sir John, said that he had been sent by the “King of Cincinnati”. (I don’t see my old hometown mentioned much in fiction, and I absolutely wasn’t expecting it here.)

This story starts out dark, and it gets darker as it goes, and not in the ways the reader initially expects.

First because it’s saturated with Shrike’s bottomless grief. She and her wife were childhood besties, young sweethearts, happy marrieds, and now Shrike is a widow. At seventeen, because people in the outlands don’t live past 40 if they even reach that milestone.

Most monsters are found early, because the metamorphosis manifests as an illness that changes people from, well, people, to red-eyed shapeshifters with hoofs and horns, or feathers and claws, or gills and fins, and eventually to all of the above in a neverending kaleidoscope of transformation.

Shrike, as the historian, archivist, chronicler and storyteller of the hollow, knows that the mutation isn’t truly a disease, and that there is no real cure. Her only real fear about the nature of her wife’s condition is her fear that the transformation has wiped out May’s recognition of her and her memory of their love.

The knight’s secret provides Shrike with the answer she has long hoped for, even as her storytelling provides him with an answer that he wishes he had never learned.

As I listened to the audiobook of The Knight and the Butcherbird, read marvelously by Aida Reluzco, even as I was absorbed in the story I was surprised, teased and occasionally outright puzzled by all the stories it reminded me of. And I want to share those before I close as on the one hand this story was exactly the right length for what it wanted to tell AND I wanted more like it at the same conflicted time.

The setup of the elite Enclaves vs the disease-ridden outlands is very similar to The Annual Migration of Clouds and We Speak Through the Mountains, definitely including the patronizing attitudes of the Enclave citizens towards the outlanders they exploit. The slow, hidden transformation of humans into monsters, as well as that creepy border-shifting sense that the story is on the sharp and pointy line between the darkest of fantasy and the fear-shiver of horror is similar to T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead and What Feasts at Night as well as Kerstin Hall’s Star Eater. (Tracking down that the thing stuck in my head was Star Eater took quite a while because I didn’t even like it all that much but it there were parts of it that were creepy in exactly the same way that The Knight and the Butcherbird is creepy, although Star Eater has plenty of extra creepy bits that are all its own.) There are also hints of Idolfire in those dying dystopian outlands.

But the biggest surprises were just how much of The Last Unicorn and the movie Ladyhawke I found in The Knight and the Butcherbird. I wasn’t expecting both the state of the world and Sir John’s quest to hit so many of the same notes that The Last Unicorn did. And I absolutely did not come into this story thinking that Ladyhawke would fly away with the whole thing after all.

The Knight and the Butcherbird is not exactly a happy story, but it is a haunting one. It is also very, very satisfying, in an astonishingly rueful way. I’m glad I spent an hour with the knight, the butcherbird, and their beloved monsters.

A- #AudioBookReview: Kills Well With Others by Deanna Raybourn

Posted on March 14, 2025March 13, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> book reviews

Kills Well with Others (Killers of a Certain Age, #2) by Deanna Raybourn
Narrator: Jane Oppenheimer, Christina Delaine
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Killers of a Certain Age #2
Pages: 368
Length: 10 hours and 19 minutes
Published by Berkley, Penguin Audio on March 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

“Much like fine wine, battle-hardened assassins grow better with age.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner

Four women assassins, senior in status—and in age—sharpen their knives for another bloody good adventure in this riotous follow-up to the New York Times bestselling sensation Killers of a Certain Age.

After more than a year of laying low, Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie are called back into action. They have enjoyed their time off, but the lack of excitement is starting to chafe: a professional killer can only take so many watercolor classes and yoga sessions without itching to strangle someone...literally. When they receive a summons from the head of the elite assassin organization known as the Museum, they are ready tackle the greatest challenge of their careers.

Someone on the inside has compiled a list of important kills committed by Museum agents, connected to a single, shadowy figure, an Eastern European gangster with an iron fist, some serious criminal ambition, and a tendency to kill first and ask questions later. This new nemesis is murdering agents who got in the way of their power hungry plans and the aging quartet of killers is next.

Together the foursome embark on a wild ride across the globe on the double mission of rooting out the Museum’s mole and hunting down the gangster who seems to know their next move before they make it. Their enemy is unlike any they’ve faced before, and it will take all their killer experience to get out of this mission alive.

My Review:

The wifi wasn’t THAT bad. No, seriously, I took the same trip on the MS Queen Mary 2 last summer, the one that the team from Killers of a Certain Age takes from New York City to Southampton in the early stages of this caper – and the wifi honestly wasn’t that bad. The rest of the ship, at least the parts we saw of it, were very much as described.

No murder though. At least, not as far as we heard!

Then again, Billie and company are very, very good at their jobs, and the whole point of sending in an elite team of assassins is for them to make the murder look like it never happened. Not that Pasha Lazarov isn’t very, very dead when Billie’s done with him and his teddy bear, but that his death doesn’t look like a murder at all.

Don’t worry, the teddy bear is fine. Pasha, not so much, but then that was the point. Even if, as Billie suspects, he was the wrong point.

Still, contract complete, case closed. Right? Wrong, as the team discovers when they make their way to their safe house and discover that the house isn’t safe at all. In fact, it’s on FIRE.

And suddenly, so is this story. Because someone in their organization has sold them out, put a target on their backs while aiming them at the wrong villain for the wrong reasons even as the real monster plans to toy with them as they chase the true mastermind around Europe while that mastermind plots revenge, mayhem and a gigantic payday steeped in blood and decades in the making.

It’s all about the ‘one that got away’. For the traitor, it’s about a future they let slip out of their hands. For the villain, it’s payback for the murder of their father – who truly was an evil bastard – at the righteous hands of Billie and her team. For the team, it’s about a case they were never able to close and a luminous piece of looted Nazi art that they were never able to restore.

Until now. If they survive. If, instead of age and treachery beating youth and skill, age and skill can manage to beat youth and treachery one more time.

Escape Rating A-: The first book in this series, Killers of a Certain Age, was both an absolute surprise and an utter delight. Just as “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” – a catchphrase whose origins Billie and her team are just the right age to remember and appreciate – nobody expects a quartet of sixty-something women to be an elite team of assassins. Not unless they remember the movie Red with Helen Mirren playing a character who could easily have been one of Billie’s aliases, or who have fallen in love with The Thursday Murder Club series, whose main character is also quite a bit like Billie and is also played by the same actress in the upcoming TV series.

While that was not as big a digression as it could have been, that digression is a bit on point for this story.

The main story here, as it was in the first book, is told from Billie’s first-person perspective as she and her team are in the midst of the case at hand – even as that case goes utterly off-kilter and entirely out-of-whack. Not that even at the outset it was as ‘in whack’ as it should have been.

But the case does itself digress on occasion, to cases and contracts and errors and omissions in some of the team’s earlier contracts, told from an omniscient third-person perspective. At first, it seems as if those trips down memory lane are for context about their past and their skills, but as the net closes in so too do those memories as various nooses tighten and the past catches up to the present.

At the same time, the case in the present is a wild thrill ride, interwoven with a whole lot of tips and tricks about hiding in plain sight and escaping without a trace and the way that even their oldest tricks still work fantastically well because the weakest point in ANY security system, even the most technically advanced and supposedly unbreakable, is always the human factor. And those haven’t changed at all.

Initially, the story moves just a bit slowly, as, well, cruise ships are wont to do. But the reader catches Billie’s nagging suspicion that something isn’t right fairly early, and we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop right along with her.

When it does – or actually when it catches fire – the story is off, not just to the races but to a whirlwind tour of both sides of the Mediterranean in pursuit of a dead woman with a plan for revenge so cold that she’s willing to take out her own family to see it done.

And still, and yet, and at the heart of it all is the ride or die sisterhood of these four women who will and have, killed and nearly died for each other over the course of four decades – and their bickering willingness to argue and fight and still protect each other and the hostages to fortune they have all gathered along the way – sometimes in spite of themselves.

Just as I wasn’t expecting that first book, I wasn’t expecting this to turn into a series. Hoping, certainly, but not expecting. Which means I’ve been waiting for this with the proverbial bated breath, was absolutely thrilled to get it, and was utterly absorbed by it in both text and marvelous audio – switching back and forth so I could find out how they got out of this mess that much sooner.

All of which means I’m left in the exact same place I was at the end of Killers of a Certain Age. I had a ball with Billie and her found family, and I would love to ride with this crew again. But the story ends in a way that could BE the end. They all do sound like they’ve found the respective happy ever afters that none of them thought they would live to see. Or in Billie’s case, even want.

Howsomever, the first book started because there was something rotten at the heart of their organization that, let’s say, interfered with their pending retirements. They got dragged into THIS case because there was something that was rotten at the heart of their organization that interfered in an entirely different way with their retirements.

When this case gets wrapped up, they make a new and better deal for the retirements they all actually seemed to want this time around. Which doesn’t mean that they got all the rot out of the organization this time around. In fact, I’d kind of be surprised if they had. And very happy about it – possibly much happier than they’ll be if I’m right.

Grade A #AudioBookReview: Tea You at the Altar by Rebecca Thorne

Posted on March 6, 2025March 5, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

Tea You at the Altar (Tomes & Tea #3) by Rebecca Thorne
Narrator: Jessica Threet
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy romance
Series: Tomes and Tea #3
Pages: 336
Length: 11 hours and 41 minutes
Published by Bramble Romance, Macmillan Audio on March 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Princess Bride meets Travis Baldree in Tea You at the Altar, the third cosy fantasy in Rebecca Thorne's bestselling Tomes & Tea series. Our sapphic adventurers must navigate the ultimate maelstrom – their own wedding!
Kianthe and Reyna are ready to finally walk down the aisle, and in just seven days their wedding of a wifetime will become a reality. There's still so much to do but, like all best-laid plans, everything seems to be going awry.
Their baby dragons are causing mayhem in the town of Tawney, and Kianthe’s uptight parents have invited themselves to the wedding. Yet, worst of all, Reyna has become embroiled in a secret plot to overthrow Queen Tilaine. The world seems against them – and how are they going to live long enough to say ‘I do’?

My Review:

The Tomes & Tea Quartet has turned out to be an epitome of cozy fantasy romance – something I don’t think anyone expected when Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea came out pretty much directly in the wake of Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes and we were all very much there for it because there wasn’t anything else like either of them at the time.

Of course, there is now because they’re both oh-so-good and they have very much of the same feels and yet they’re not nearly as much like each other as appeared at first blush. And all the blushes thereafter.

The thing about cozy fantasy is that, while bad things do happen to good people, the bad things aren’t necessarily all that bad – and they tend to get resolved in peaceful – or at least bloodless – ways.

But Tomes & Tea has hewed a bit closer to its fantasy roots in that there really is true evil afoot in the person of capricious, rapacious Queen Tilaine, and the solution to the Queendom’s – and the whole world’s tyrant queen problem is going to involve some political shenanigans, some dangerous skullduggery, and a certain amount of outright treason.

In other words, this is the story where Kianthe and Reyna stage a coup against the very queen that Reyna once swore fealty to as a Queensguard. The thing about staging a coup is that both successful and failed versions of that act generally end up bloody. The only question is which side the blood belongs to, with the answer generally being both – and LOTS of it.

But this coup is all wrapped up in lace and chiffon, as the overthrow is intended to occur in the literal middle of Reyna and Kianthe’s wedding. But that’s only if they manage to get all their ducks and pirates in a row, wrangle the townspeople of Tawney AND Kianthe’s estranged parents, keep last-minute suitors for both brides at bay and, last but absolutely not least, find a second-choice candidate for Queen to stand against Tilaine – because their first and otherwise only contender just said “not just no but hells no” and has managed to make it stick in spite of all the pressure to change her mind.

Escape Rating A: I was intending to savor this a bit. After all, it’s the next-to-the-last entry in the Tomes & Tea series, and I’m not going to be ready for it to end, even at the end of the next book. Probably no one else will be, either.

But I was listening to this in audio, the narrator Jessica Threet was doing a lovely job, the story was proceeding at a lively but not breakneck pace – it’s not that kind of story – and I realized that the cozy pace was beautifully concealing an ever ratcheting amount of underlying tension and I just couldn’t wait any longer and read the last third in a rush because it was just time for the other boot to fall, for Queen Tilaine to crash the party, and for someone’s world AND worldview to come crashing down.

Hopefully Tilaine’s, but I’d reached the point where I HAD to know, my patience was out, and another hour was going to see me through to the end if I was willing to stay up for it.

Which, of course, I was. And I did. And OMG the damn thing ends on a huge and downright shocking and even painful cliffhanger and the final book in the quartet, Alchemy and a Cup of Tea, won’t be published until August 12 but I already have an eARC and I doubt I’ll be able to wait that long to find out what happens next. And finally.

Kianthe and Reyna have earned their happy ever after, they deserve it, they’re entitled to it, and I can’t wait to see it happen. And I probably won’t. Wait that is. (Wherever the line was when they were passing out patience, I didn’t start out with nearly enough to stand in it and wait to get more.)

If you LOVE cozy fantasy, you’re going to leave Tea You at the Altar already itching for the finale and looking for something to tide you over in the meantime. Alchemy and a Cup of Tea isn’t coming until August. The next Legends & Lattes book, Brigands & Breadknives, isn’t coming until NOVEMBER, so that won’t help with the tiding over unless you need to get caught up and/or want to indulge in a reread while you wait.

If you haven’t had a chance to blush over Kimberly Lemming’s Mead Mishaps series, (That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon, That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf, and That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Human (yes, there’s a theme here!)), that series has a very similar vibe to both Legends & Lattes AND Tomes & Tea, (including the pirates!) and is just plain cozy – and even sexier – fantasy romance fun and should keep the vibe going long enough to get to Alchemy and a Cup of Tea – along with plenty of cups of tea, of course!

A- #AudioBookReview: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

Posted on February 19, 2025February 18, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
Narrator: Gem Carmella
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fairy tales, fantasy, fantasy romance, retellings
Pages: 130
Length: 3 hours and 53 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tordotcom on March 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Follow the river Liss to the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, and meet two sisters who cannot be separated, even in death.
“Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.”
In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.
There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.
But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk…

My Review:

Thistleford lies just on the borders of Faerie – or Arcadia as it is called in this beautiful, lyrical almost fairy tale. (It reads so much like a fairy tale, and it certainly turns out to be one, but I kept thinking it must be a retelling of something I just didn’t recognize – and maybe it is.)

Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn live on the banks of the River Liss, and their joy as well as their duty is to sing to the magical willows that thrive on the banks of the river. It’s a task, and a delight, that has been handed down through the Hawthorn family for generations. Not just the singing, but also the care, maintenance and very careful harvesting of the willows and all the magical things they produce.

Because there is still magic in this world, even as ‘modernity’ encroaches, and the willows that the Hawthorn family tends produce the best magic-infused wood for working this world’s magic. A magic that is based on language, on the conjugation of words, and the transition of forms from the word “grammar” into “grimoire” – and back again.

Which is where the story of the Hawthorn sisters turns from love to tragedy and back again. Esther, the older sister, has fallen in love, not just with the Fae lands of Arcadia that border their own, but with one of the Arcadians, the wrath of the storm that calls themself Rin even as they refer to Esther as ‘Beloved’.

But Ysabel longs to remain with hearth and home, and resents the parting that she knows will come. She wants Esther to marry the neighbor who continues to court her in spite of her rejection – because that’s the future she wants for herself.

Instead, they find themselves thrust into the middle of exactly the kind of ‘murder ballad’ that Ysabel always loved to sing, and it’s left to Esther to sacrifice even more than she already has to keep Ysabel from making the same terrible mistake.

If she can find a way to make the magic that saved her reach out to a woman who has always loved her sister but rejected the magic that drives her very soul.

Escape Rating A-: The audio narration of The River Has Roots, in the hands – and more importantly the voice – of Gem Carmella – is absolutely exquisite. Not that the story isn’t lovely, but the reading, and even more poignantly the singing, of the narrator puts this story over the top in more than one way. (That the background and transitional music in the narration was performed by the author and her own sister added an extra bit of loveliness to the entire endeavor.)

Most of those ways are very, very good. The music of the Hawthorn Sisters is an important part – sometimes THE most important part – of the story.

There were also, however, and very much on the other hand, points where she was voicing the villain of the piece and she was so damn good at portraying his slimy villainousness that I wanted to throw something – preferably at him. He was so vile, and portrayed so well in that vileness, that I wanted to wash that voice out of my ears.

It took me a while to figure out what bothered me SO MUCH about the villain – because it was done so beautifully well – is that he’s a particular kind of villain. He’s a broken stair villain. He’s toxic, Esther knows he’s toxic, the narrator handles voicing his toxicity so well that it’s screamingly obvious, but he’s the kind of villain that is embedded in the system and manipulates it to his advantage even as the people around him just claim that he’s socially awkward and Esther KNOWS she’ll be portrayed as a hysterical female or receive some other gendered dismissal as long as he continues to seem like he’s obeying social norms and just doing it badly when he’s really hiding his despicable intentions under a thin veneer of ‘polite behavior’ and what he’s really trying to do is box Esther in so that she has no choice but to submit.

I’m going to try real hard to get down off this soapbox, but I’ll admit that it’s giving me extreme difficulty. The whole thing disturbed me considerably more than intended – but it SO DID.

As is fitting for a fantasy where the magical system is based on language, I fell so, so hard for the gorgeous lyricality of this story. At the same time, I have to confess that I was one of the few people who just didn’t ‘get’ or ‘get into’ This Is How You Lose the Time War, so I came into The River Has Roots hoping that I would like it but not predisposed to do so. It was an experiment that this time paid off.

From the beginning, the story reminded me a LOT of The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed with its setting on the edge of a dangerous fae country and its rules about coming in and attempting to go back out. It also very much has the feel of a fairy tale, and if it turned out to be a reworking or retelling of an existing tale I wouldn’t be surprised. Additionally it held echoes of Sharyn McCrumb’s Appalachian-based Ballad series that begins with If Ever I Return Pretty Peggy-O, which, come to think of it, are also murder ballads.

All of which meant that I wasn’t expecting a happy ending and was VERY pleasantly surprised – as were the Hawthorn sisters – when one arrived anyway. I’ll certainly be back the next time the author publishes a solo endeavor!

A- #AudioBookReview: Thaumaturgic Tapas by Tao Wong

Posted on February 18, 2025February 18, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

Thaumaturgic Tapas (Hidden Dishes #3) by Tao Wong
Narrator: Emily Woo Zeller
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, fantasy, foodie fiction, urban fantasy
Series: Hidden Dishes #3
Pages: 140
Length: 4 hours
Published by Dreamscape Media, Starlit Publishing on March 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

With Magic Comes Mayhem
For the Nameless Restaurant, once a discreet hole-in-the-wall meant for a cast of supernatural regulars, the increasing levels of background magic has brought with it that most dreadful of locusts - new customers.
The staff of the Nameless Restaurant are finding the influx of new customers - both mortal and magical - to be a challenge. They're reaching a breaking point and something has to give.
The only question is, will it be Mo Meng's rules on magic or the restaurant itself?
Thaumaturgic Tapas is the third standalone novella in the cozy cooking fantasy series Hidden Dishes.
The Hidden Dishes series is a cozy cooking fantasy perfect for fans of Travis Baldree's Legends & Lattes and Junpei Inuzuka's Restaurant to Another World. Written by bestselling author Tao Wong, his other series include the System Apocalypse, A Thousand Li, Climbing the Ranks, Hidden Wishes and Adventures on Brad series.

My Review:

This third book in the mouthwateringly delicious Hidden Dishes series (after The Nameless Restaurant and Chaotic Aperitifs) was supposed to be titled Sorcerous Plates. Magical chef Mo Meng’s ‘plates’ absolutely are not sorcerous – no matter what each book might be called – but the dishes he serves on those mundane plates are definitely magically delicious. And all without the use of any charms, lucky or otherwise, in his cooking process.

Not that he isn’t using a bit more magic in his cooking than he promised himself he would in the early days of his Nameless Restaurant. When the series began, Mo Meng served a small and self-selecting clientele of mostly supernatural diners – or at least those in the know about the supernatural world.

Until a chaotic visit from a newly awakened jinn changed all that which is the story in The Nameless Restaurant, and now Mo Meng and his human jill-of-all-trades-except-cooking, Kelly, have way more diners than they can handle or the tiny restaurant can actually hold.

Bowing to the necessity that either Kelly or himself – and someday both – need help before they are run literally off their feet, he has placed magical ‘Help Wanted’ signs around Toronto’s magical district. Those signs bear strange fruit in the person of a young demon looking to get out from under his infamous sire’s very large and possibly downright sulfurous thumb.

As long as Damian doesn’t set either the restaurant or its patrons on fire – literally – his help is very much needed as part of this evening’s crew at the restaurant, as Mo Meng has chosen to challenge himself by creating a menu consisting entirely of ‘leftovers’.

Which leads to a lot of small plates attempting to fill some supernaturally large appetites, some upset mundanes who don’t like the lack of a fixed menu, a reservation system, a waiting list and especially the lack of electronic outlets for their ever-present gadgets.

But the real story at the Nameless Restaurant is all about the creation of this quirky community of ultimate insiders, along with the inside joke of a vampire lawyer negotiating a contract between a very young demon and a very old witch, while a pair of government agents look on trying to determine whether it is, or is not, their circus and whether they should or are even capable of doing anything about this particular bit of magical ‘monkey business’.

It’s all in a day’s, or an evening’s, work at the Nameless Restaurant, a truly magical place to spend an evening. If only there were a way to magically pull the meals Mo Meng prepares out of the book and onto one’s own table!

Escape Rating A-: First, this series needs a trigger warning – but not the usual kind. Because reading and/or listening to Mo Meng’s meditations on cooking as well as his descriptions of the ingredients he’s using and the meal he’s preparing are guaranteed to make anyone hungry. This warning particularly applies to listening in the car on the way to the grocery store!

Howsomever, Mo Meng’s thoughts and observations about his long life and experience as a chef, as well as his meditations about available ingredients and exactly how he plans to use them in that night’s recipes are very, well, meditative. In the voice of the narrator of the series, Emily Woo Zeller, I could have listened to Mo Meng for hours – which I did.

Having listened to the first book, The Nameless Restaurant, and this latest, Thaumaturgic Tapas, while having read the second, Chaotic Aperitifs, I would personally recommend that if you enjoy audiobooks at all you get this series in audio if you can. It’s still very good as a book, but the audio adds something special, at least IMHO.

The format of each entry in the series so far is that of a ‘day in the life’ of Mo Meng and his restaurant. He begins the day deciding what he’ll serve that night, shopping for ingredients, and often having a conversation with his front-of-house manager (and jill of all trades), Kelly, about how things are going.

This entry in the series begins with both of them admitting out loud, for each other if not for themselves, that they are being run off their feet and that something has got to give. In this case, what gives is his wish to not add another employee. Mo Meng is immortal and he can use magic to help himself in the kitchen – although he’d rather not. But Kelly is mortal and she can only run but so fast in a tiny restaurant filled with tables.

So change has come, and Damian the young demon sweeps in with it, lowering himself to starting at the bottom – as a mere busboy – even as he battles the pride that seems to be one of his besetting – or perhaps inherited – sins.

Most of the story, however, is taken up with the bustling hours of the evening, when the restaurant is open and filled with customers – as well as with customers’ impatience and egos. But the mundane customers who chafe at the restrictions are mostly there to add a bit of heat and spice to the recipe.

What makes the story are the regular customers, who are not so regular at all. They offer a glimpse into the supernatural community, as well as the continuity of their continuing stories. Also, in this particular case, a bit of ballast, as long-time frenemies, Jotun and Tobias, a frost giant and a dwarf, have an eating contest that leaves them both groaning from over-excess.

That the two ‘creatures’ manage to leave their bill in the hands of the government agents set to watch them adds just the right – and light – note to this charming third entry in this delicious cozy fantasy series.

If you are waiting for the next books in either the Legends & Lattes series or The Kamogawa Food Detectives series, these Hidden Dishes will fill the empty spot while you’re waiting.

Speaking of waiting, it turns out those Sorcerous Plates might be magical after all – or at least in possession of a time travel charm. The next book in the Hidden Dishes series is, once again, Sorcerous Plates.

#AudioBookReview: I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming + #Excerpt

Posted on February 14, 2025February 12, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I'm Trapped in a Rom-Com (Cosmic Chaos, #1) by Kimberly Lemming
Narrator: Hazel Addison
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Libro.fm, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: alien abduction romance, Romance, romantasy, science fiction romance
Series: Cosmic Chaos #1
Pages: 304
Length: 9 hours and 23 minutes
Published by Berkley, Penguin Audio on February 18, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A hilarious and sexy romance about a woman who gets dropped on a strange planet only to fall for not one, but two, aliens, from the author of That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf.

Dorothy Valentine is close to getting her PhD in wildlife biology when she’s attacked by a lion. On the bright side, she’s saved! On the not-so-bright side, it’s because they’re abducted by aliens. In her scramble to escape, Dory and the lion commandeer an escape pod and crash-land on an alien planet that has...dinosaurs?

Dory and her new lion bestie, Toto, are saved in the nick of time by a mysterious and sexy alien, Sol. On their new adventure, they team up with the equally hot, equally dangerous Lok, who may or may not be a war criminal. Whether it be trauma, fate, or intrigue, Dory can’t resist the attraction that’s developing in their trio....

As this ragtag group of misfits explore their new planet, Dory learns more about how and why they’ve all ended up together, battles more prehistoric creatures than she imagined (she imagined...zero), and questions if she even wants to go back home to Earth in this hilarious and steamy alien romance adventure comedy romp.

My Review:

Today is Valentine’s Day, which screamed for a romance to be today’s book. I really want to claim that aliens made me do this book to celebrate the day, but that’s not my story.

However, it is, it oh so definitely is, Dory’s story. It’s right there in the title, I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com. Because Dory was abducted by aliens, and she is trapped in what the aliens believed was a rom-com.

Dory’s mileage definitely varies on that. Her story definitely turns into the ‘rom’ part of that phrase. It also, certainly does have plenty of humor in it. But part of that humor is that the aliens intended to set up a rom-com without having an actual feather of a clue as to what either ‘rom’ or ‘com’ truly mean to humans. Or, for that matter, to the Sankado, the species they’ve already abducted.

So Dory isn’t trapped in a rom-com. She does, however, totally and absolutely, get ensnared in the romance part of that equation. Times two.

And it’s a screaming ‘O’ of a blast every wild and crazy step of the way.

Escape Rating B: I picked this one up because a) that spoileriffic title and b) the author’s Mead Mishaps series was incredibly fun (start with That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon and be prepared to both blush furiously and ROFL while doing so.) Not to mention c) the book comes out on Tuesday, today is Valentine’s Day and the perfect timing of the whole thing could not be ignored. At least not by moi.

The trope this story wallows in is a familiar one. Of course it’s the ‘Aliens Made Them Do It’ ™ plot device – the one that the author is using and not the aliens making them do it. Also, the author is using it correctly while the aliens flubbed nearly all of their attempts – which is part of the fun of the thing.

The thing about this particular trope is that it screams for a ‘dubcon’ (that’s dubious consent) warning that can literally be seen from outer space. Dory, along with her partners Sol and Lok, clearly do consent to everything in the moment, but the reader can easily get hung up and thrown out of the story on the question of whether it’s true consent because the aliens have drugged all of them to create that consent at the outset.

Dory occasionally throws herself out of her own story because her desires in the moment and her resulting behavior are contrary to everything she ever knew about herself.

Some readers will be totally squicked out. Some will be all into the scene. Because I was listening to a chunk of the story, I was both blushing furiously (listening to a third party describe a sex scene is just weird) and getting a bit weirded out by just how much the way her partners talked sounded like grooming her to accept things she otherwise wouldn’t.

(BTW the audio narration was FINE, I only switched to the ebook because I was all in and reading is just plain faster.)

In the end I concluded that Dory was just discovering that she was really into the kink of it all and that was okay. But your reading mileage may go through some rough patches along the way and it may definitely vary.

The part of the story that’s just purely funny – in a very wry and totally satirical way – is the way that the particular aliens who got them ALL into this mess created said mess through bureaucratic insanity, academic pomposity, and shoddy research. They created the initial mess, dug themselves a hole and threw the first results of that mess into it, realized that they’d screwed up and then dug some more and made the hole bigger.

Anyone who has ever done research or worked in either a big bureaucratic organization or in academia is going to see the situation for the hilarious and rueful set up that it is and just laugh until tears run down their face because it’s true and awful and truly awful and so very much more common than anyone wants to admit.

But this is still Valentine’s Day so I need to get back to the romance. While the aliens may have been trying to set up a rom-com, in truth this is a sex-into-love romance times two. Dory and her partners create a really hot triad. And in an entirely different kind of warning, while this trio does set fire to the sheets, there is actual fire but no actual sheets. The sexytimes, as Dory herself would say, are “hot as balls” and the scenes never, ever fade to black.

Whether or not that’s your thing, it certainly turns out to be theirs. Even if it’s not you’ll still want to slap the alien meddler who is not just watching, he’s taking notes. Dory certainly does – and who can blame her?

In the end, there are multiple facets to this wild romp of a romance. There’s the meddling aliens who screw up and set off the whole entire mess. There’s the incredibly hot romance between Dory and her two sexy partners, who fall in love while an incompetent research intern meddles with their lives every step of the way.

Last but not least, there’s the two sets of sentient beings, alien to each other, who have been thrown together against their wills trying to make the best of it – in spite of yet more alien meddling. That’s clearly going to be the throughline for the entire Cosmic Chaos series, as this story ends with that incompetent research intern failing upwards into a promotion that Dory and her friends are sure to make certain he regrets at every turn. Or at least I certainly hope so and am looking forward to finding out.

The true level of Cosmic Chaos in this story has to be experienced to be believed, so I’m going to leave you with this excerpt from the opening of I Got Abducted by Aliens… so that you can experience a bit of Dory’s voice for yourself. One last thing, that lion, to quote Dory, “THE FUCKING LION!” turns out to be the very best wingman a displaced human could EVER have.

Excerpt from I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming

“Fuck, I’m dead?” I snarled, gazing down at the desert. A bright light was pulling me farther into the sky. Which was probably good, right? I’m not the religious type, but I think the general consensus is that up is good.

“All right, not all bad, I guess?” I turned to have a look around, taking in the sights before— “THE FUCKING LION!” I screamed, trying to kick away my murderer. The sandy-brown fur of its mouth was stained a telltale red. I put a hand to my throat, flinching when pain erupted. My hand came back covered in blood. “All right, so you definitely didn’t miss. What is going on?”

The lion ignored me; instead his eyes remained transfixed by what he saw above us. I stilled and looked up to see the clouds shimmering. A darker spot opened up in the sky. A greenish light sparkled out of it until the force pulling me sped up to a breakneck pace. The light became blinding, and I . . . I must have fainted.

The next thing I knew, I was in a tank. My body felt too heavy to move. There was a tickling sensation on my neck. Reaching out, I tried to touch the glass front of the tank but couldn’t reach it. When I cried out, bubbles floated uselessly out of my mouth. I wasn’t sure how long I was floating as I drifted in and out of consciousness.

Muffled chirping met my ears. I struggled to open my eyes, but the room was so damn bright.

Why . . . why do I smell cotton candy? Am I having a stroke? I thought that was burnt toast. Dammit. I knew I should have taken that CPR class. What smell meant you were having a stroke?

A sharp zap to my neck shocked me awake. Birds were chirping all around me. I struggled to get up. Something dug into my arms, so I thrashed. Strings lined with suction cups snapped off my arm with little pops. The birds’ chirping grew angrier as I pulled my other arm free. I blinked and looked around to see what looked like . . . owls?

“What the fuck?” I asked. Mutant-looking owls with large fluffy ears fluttered around me, chirping and fussing. Their feathers ranged in color from simple blacks and grays to the colorful blue and orange plumage you would normally find on a tropical bird. Which, frankly, is a wild range of colors for one species to have. I wonder if it’s gender-based.

Focus.

Macaw-like beaks took up a third of their face. Their flapping wings ended in tiny three-fingered hands. One of them was dressed in a white robe and it was trying to probe me with some horseshoe-looking gun thing.

I smacked it away from me and got to my feet. “One of you better start chirping in English,” I warned. Fear and rage caused the threat to come out in a stuttered shout.

The birds were unaffected.

Unfortunate.

I touched my neck, unsure if I’d truly died and gone to some bird hell. But all I felt was smooth skin. When I inspected my hand, not a drop of blood was found. I checked the other side; still nothing. “If I’m not dead, how am I healed?”

The room was lined with rows of cylindrical tanks filled with green liquid. I peered closer at their contents to see the face of a sleeping woman floating in the tank. Her round face looked serene. Long braids fanned out around her face. A few tapped their beaded ends against the glass. The hair rose on the back of my neck as I took in each tank, noting that every one of them held a person. I rubbed my eyes, trying to wake up from the nightmare. Yet when I looked around again, the pods and their occupants remained. Worse still, I noticed that all of them were women.

Reality sank to the pit of my stomach. I was on an alien spaceship. Those aliens only felt the need to capture women, and I’d just woken up on an operating table. If this wasn’t hell, it was about to be.

Screaming, I stumbled away from the nearest alien, then snatched a tray off the counter next to the table where I’d woken up. Glass vials and unsettling-looking tools crashed to the floor when I flung it at the nearest alien. Two slightly bigger Owlish came at me with what looked like cattle prods. I grabbed hold of one and kicked off its owner, then swung wildly at its partner. The bird’s squawk was cut short when my stick hit the side of its head, sending the creature flying back. Not knowing what else to do, I just swung at any of the little aliens that came within striking distance.

Farther into the room was a dome-like door leading to a hallway. I leapt over two of the Owlish, caught my foot on one, then tripped and fell on my ass. The fall knocked the stick out of my hand; it ricocheted off the ceiling and slammed into a glass case lining the wall. Blue goop spilled out all over my hair. It weighed down my wild red curls until they felt like rivers of slime. “No! No strange alien goop in my hair, dammit!” I wailed, scrambling back on my feet. “Fuck, my ass is gonna die. I’m so gonna die.”

One of the Owlish squawked like a penguin and stomped closer to me. I jumped up, shoving it aside before I sped down the hallway. My vision blurred, causing me to stumble against the wall. The slime dripping down my head grew hot, and the skin where it touched tingled. “Oh, gross. This better not be poison,” I said, wiping it away quickly.

I burst into the first room I encountered to see that it was full of bigger penguin-looking bird aliens and slammed the door shut. “Nope.”

I swore all the way down to the next room and locked myself behind the door. Then I looked around to see that I had made a poor, poor decision, as this room was full of so many more Owlish, some with the cattle prods, and, of course, the motherfucking lion.

My murderer was floating in a ray of light on a table, completely unaware of its surroundings. Flapping noises beat on the door at my back and the Owlish in the room began chattering angrily. Those with cattle prods advanced.

. . . Fuck this.

“You know what? If I have to die”—I raised a finger to all the bird fuckers in the room—“we’re all gonna die.” I grabbed the nearest Owlish and threw it at the others charging forward.

Format: audiobook

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#AudioBookReview: I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming + #Excerpt

Excerpt from I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming

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Excerpt from I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming

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